Migration, Citizenship and the City: How Migrant Rights Movements Are Challenging the Urban Political Arena

• In Event: 242 - Section on International Migration Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 18. Civic Engagement

Abstract

The present paper outlines the core of my current PhD research project on urban political mobilization around migrant rights issues. It focuses on coalitions, advocacy groups and grassroots movements whose objective is the improvement of the legal, political and social standing of migrants. The main objective is to investigate the process of politicization of these different collective actors, looking at if and how migrant rights movements are challenging institutional local politics, both at the formal and substantial level. On the one hand, by looking at the process through which different urban spaces produce migrants’ rights movements that embody different organizational strategies, this research wishes to point to the importance of the ‘local’ opportunity structure, including availability of organizational and technical resources, in shaping organizing and mobilization. On the other hand, by looking at the effects of such networked organizational strategies in shaping the struggle for migrant rights, the research wishes to investigate alternative practices of ‘citizenry-making’ from below and their implications for the political incorporation of migrants and other actors involved in social mobilization. A secondary and related objective is to explore the potential of diffusion of such ‘organizing cultures’ across cities, looking at how local models of organizing may be exported to other cities through physical and digital networks. The research relies on a mixed research methodology: 1) social network analysis; 2) ethnographic fieldwork, and uses the cities of London and Los Angeles as empirical case studies.

Author

• Davide Gnes, University of Amsterdam