Cities of fears, cities of homes – video

In this webinar organised by the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) on 21 September, Professor Nasar Meer (The University of Edinburgh) explores the need to re-think two coterminous concerns: the rediscovery of the ‘local’ and the city in particular, and an understanding of the experience of displaced migration in Europe. Drawing on Bauman’s (2003) distinction between ‘cities of fears’ and ‘cities of hopes’, he asks what a focus on the ’local’ can tell us about recent developments in the governance of displaced migrants and refugees. Taking a multi-sited approach spanning cases in the south and north of Europe, Nasar discusses the challenge of housing and accommodation in particular, to consider how local and city level approaches may reproduce, negotiate and sometimes significantly diverge from national level policy and rhetoric, and what these means for our understanding of cities and displaced migration today.

About the speaker: Nasar Meer is Professor of Race, Identity and Citizenship at the University of Edinburgh, PI of the H2020 GLIMER project and Editor in Chief of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. To find out more: http://www.nasarmeer.com/