Spaces of Politics and Humanitarianism: Local Population’s Attitudes towards Refugee Centers

My current postdoctoral project, “Spaces of Politics and Humanitarianism: Local Population’s Attitudes towards Refugee Centers”, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, examines how European citizens relate to refugee facilities in the aftermath of the “long summer of migration” of 2015. I posit that the architectural features and spatial conditions of immigration facilities and their surroundings crucially impact the forms of political engagement, as well as affective experiences, that underlie attitudes towards refugees. Accordingly, I focus on local citizens’ everyday practices and sensations related to these sites, and how spatial and material configurations affect their attitudes to people on the move.

Methodologically, I will conduct document analysis, in-depth interviews, and field observations at two sites in Leipzig and Dresden. I will focus on how the physical and spatial features of refugee facilities influence both the everyday experiences and attitudes of local citizens as well as political activities directed at these sites.

This project makes a novel contribution to existing scholarship on migration since 2015 by explicitly focusing on the local residents of the receiving society. To date, critical scholars have extensively examined the experiences of the refugees themselves, highlighting their exposure to illiberal and repressive practices, their agency and resistance against these practices, and the repercussions and shifts of domestic and EU politics. There are also a number of studies, largely based on statistical data, concerning increasingly xenophobic attitudes towards the newcomers and depictions of refugees in public discourse. By contrast, I focus ethnographically on mundane experiences and political practices and their physical dimension, thus advancing studies of specific material and spatial sites that have been involved in the management of people on the move since 2015. In this way, my project addresses the lack of attention paid to how refugee facilities become part of everyday urban landscapes.

More broadly, the project contributes to the investigations of humanitarian practices and governance of migration by emphasizing their mundane dimensions. It does so by highlighting the importance of spatial and affective registers for better comprehending local reactions to asylum seekers.