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Dear all,


We are looking for papers for our panel to the AAG in New Orleans next year
- please share the below widely with networks and contacts working on
similar issues.


Our deadline for abstracts is Sunday, *15 October; *please send them to
Kavita Ramakrishnan at [log in to unmask]; Tatiana Thieme at
[log in to unmask] and Eszter Kovacs at [log in to unmask]
From Camps to Cities: European geographies of (dis)integration and response
to refugees

Over the past five years, but especially pronounced since November 2015,
refugees arriving and seeking asylum within the European Union have
strongly tested European institutions and capacities, and fragmented and
underscored geopolitical differences within the Union between east and
west. The immediate, humanitarian need for provision and care for new and
ever-longer term arrivals confront and contest the politics and lived
realities of austerity cuts that affect the young, unemployed, homeless,
and those otherwise marginalised and vulnerable.

There is a distinct multi-level geography to support and provide services
to refugees that manifests and is continually contested between the EU and
its Member States, between countries and their city and council
administrations, between European funding opportunities and local
governments, which take place across arrival and ‘transit zones’, small
towns and cities. Such wide geographies bring multiple challenges to how
and where basic and essential services may be proffered, organised,
regulated and accessed - and by whom. These political layers and needs give
rise to new politics and governance opportunities, as well as uneven and
shifting responsibilities of care. Notably, the mobilisation of civil
society organisations and ad-hoc efforts operating on shoe-string budgets
and often most present in everyday street service delivery (from meals to
blankets) has become an increasingly prominent reminder both of state
welfare absence or retreat, and heightened citizen-led humanitarian care.

This call seeks papers that consider the politics of provisioning to
refugees at multiple political levels and scales, and how these politics
overlap, reinforce or are contested through the needs of
others/marginalised and national-level discourses and histories around
refugee integration and current economic (in)securities. We are
particularly interested in research and experiences that link in
understandings of street-level provisioning with institutional
ethnographies that recognise and interrogate the rhythms/discourses of
temporal and spatial responses of political actors.

Sub-themes/questions could include:

   -

   The politics and processes of financial incentives for the care of
   refugees and the unevenness across scales;
   -

   Fragmentation in state positions and responsibilities between national
   and city-, council-level administrations;
   -

   Right to housing vs. right to asylum;
   -

   Refugee negotiations of how and when to register for asylum;
   -

   Linkages between international policy to city level forms of care and
   integration;
   -

   Different scales of governance: EU, individual member states, urban
   level, and the neighbourhood.
   -

   (Self) governance of refugees  at differing scales;
   -

   Role of urban mayors and local representations in shaping response on
   the ground but also a policy space
   -

   Tracing refugee trails and tales

Deadline for abstracts is Sunday, *15 October; *please send them to Kavita
Ramakrishnan at [log in to unmask]; Tatiana Thieme at
[log in to unmask] and Eszter Kovacs at [log in to unmask]



-- 
Eszter Krasznai Kovács
Postdoctoral Research Associate
http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/people/kovacs/
http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/watersecurityhimalayas/

Department of Geography
University of Cambridge
Downing Place
Cambridge CB2 3EN