Patricia Ehrkamp

Placing identities: Transnational practices and local attachments of Turkish immigrants in Germany

This paper examines the ways that Turkish immigrants create places of belonging in a German city. I suggest that transnational ties enable immigrants to forge local attachments through the production of place. Drawing on a neighbourhood case-study of Duisburg–Marxloh, I show how immigrants’ transnational ties and practices visibly transform their current place of residence through transnational consumption, mass media, and the establishment of communal places such as mosques and teahouses that also contribute to conflicts between groups. Their placing of identities also forms an engagement with the receiving society, as immigrants are actively carving out belonging in the face of often hostile attitudes from German residents. Viewing immigrants’ attachments from the perspective of places they create teases out the complexities of multiple and sometimes conflicting attachments of contemporary migrants, and allows for an understanding of transnational ties and engagement with the host society as complementary rather than contradictory.

Dreaming the ordinary Daily life and the complex geographies of citizenship

This paper introduces the concept of ‘ordinary’ to analyze citizenship’s complexities. Ordinary is often taken to mean standard or routine, but it also invokes order and authority. Conceptualizing citizenship as ordinary trains our attention on the ways in which the spatiality of laws and social norms are entwined with daily life. The idea of ordinariness fuses legal structures, normative orders and the experiences of individuals, social groups and communities, making citizenship both a general category and a contingent resource for political life. We explore this argument using immigrants as an example, but the conceptualization of citizenship extends more broadly.

“We Turks are No Germans”: Assimilation Discourses and the Dialectical Construction of Identities in Germany

In this paper I examine the ways in which politicians, media, and native residents formulate assimilation discourses—that is, expectations for immigrants to adapt to prevailing norms and cultures—and the effects that such discourses have on social relations in immigrant-receiving societies. Archival and ethnographic research in Germany illustrates that assimilation discourses are central in the dialectical process of identity construction in which native-born Germans and immigrants from Turkey construct their respective ‘other’, and thereby themselves. I pay particular attention to the effects of assimilation discourses in negotiations over belonging and culture at multiple scales in Germany—from the national to the neighborhood level. Space figures prominently in these negotiations, as the spaces that immigrants occupy and create often become the focus of debates about difference, otherness, and the unassimilability of migrants in Germany.

The Limits of Multicultural Tolerance? Liberal Democracy and Media Portrayals of Muslim Migrant Women in Germany

This article examines how Muslim migrant womens sexuality is instrumentalised to erect gendered and cultural boundaries of citizenship and liberal democracy in Germany. German newspaper articles on forced marriages and honour killings for a period of 10 years (1998–2008) are analysed to show how constructions of social, religious and spatial differences serve to homogenise the space of liberal democracy and the exclusion of Islam from it, thereby undermining such ideals of liberal democratic citizenship as equality.

“Under the Radar”: Undocumented Immigrants, Christian Faith Communities, and the Precarious Spaces of Welcome in the U.S. South

This article examines the limits of welcome that Christian communities of faith in the U.S. South extend to recent immigrants. We argue that churches are political spaces in which pastors and lay members weigh faith-based conceptions of hospitality against law-and-order discourses and in which notions of universal membership confront racialized immigration politics. Drawing on sixty interviews with pastors and lay ministers in thirty-five churches in Greenville–Spartanburg, South Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; and Charlotte, North Carolina, we show how hospitality within individual churches often operates quietly, “under the radar,” producing a politics of invisibility. This invisibility, although providing some shelter from harsh law enforcement practices, does little to fundamentally alter the precarious situation of immigrants. We show that as Christian ethics of hospitality come up against worldly social boundaries of race and legal status, the actual practice of hospitality in these churches falls short of biblical ideals. Our analysis furthers understandings of political and faith-based membership and the dynamic articulations between them.

‘I've had it with them!’ Younger migrant women's spatial practices of conformity and resistance

This article examines how younger migrant women from Turkey maneuver the public and private spaces of their everyday lives in a neighborhood in Germany, and how they challenge and affirm the patriarchal practices and gender norms that husbands, fathers, and older migrant women seek to impose within and outside private homes. Younger migrant women selectively comply with gendered and generational norms of veiling and dress, while at the same time also reworking gender roles, and avoiding and transgressing masculinist spaces. Younger migrant womens practices and spatial representations in mental maps reveal the complex entanglements of compliances and resistance, and dispel simple assumptions of being overwhelmingly victimized by their potentially violent men that are so prominent in contemporary Western societies.

Internationalizing Urban Theory: Toward Collaboration

This commentary responds to Jennifer Robinsons argument about internationalizing urban theory by focusing on the ways that connections across cities and space may be rethought to include non-academics and non-English speakers. I suggest that urban research may learn from other fields such as migration studies to enhance comparative methods. Collaborations, in particular those advocated by transnational feminist research and activism, provide useful avenues toward further internationalizing and advancing progressive political agendas in urban theory.

Geographies of migration I: Refugees

This first report on Geographies of Migration primarily centers on refugees. I first summarize some of the debates about categories scholars use to describe people who move across space. The article then discusses three prominent themes in geographic research on refugees, turning first to the securitization of migration, its spatial and territorial practices of migration management, and the reworking of borders. Next, I highlight research on the warehousing of refugees in camps and cities, and the protracted uncertainty these practices create. The third major strand of scholarship I discuss challenges ‘the refugee condition’ that deems refugees passive victims in need of intervention and focuses instead on refugees’ everyday and embodied experiences of displacement, their subjectivities and agency.

Policing the borders of church and societal membership: immigration and faith-based communities in the US South

ABSTRACT Policing the borders of church and societal membership: immigration and faith-based communities in the US South. Territory, Politics, Governance. This paper examines processes of border crossing and border policing within churches engaged in immigrant-outreach in the US South. Based on interviews with pastors and on focus groups with immigrant and non-immigrant congregants in 35 churches in the US South, we explore how border politics and anti-immigrant racialization intersect with the practice of faith. We argue that the complex border work undertaken by clergy members and congregants can be understood in terms of differential inclusion, that is, the extension of partial membership that may lead to a widening, rather than a diminution, of social inequalities. Immigrants themselves are cognisant of this border work and tread carefully in making claims of belonging in the church and in the state. Paying attention to the affective, emotional and performative dimensions of borders, we argue that border work needs to be understood as a diffuse set of practices undertaken by ‘ordinary’ people in the spaces of everyday life who position themselves and others as legitimate or illegitimate members of society in new immigrant destinations.

Geographies of migration II: The racial-spatial politics of immigration

This second report on geographies of migration examines scholarship on the racial-spatial politics of immigration in the Global North, which have emerged as important issues in the context of rising nativism, the criminalization of immigrants, and the racist exclusion of immigrants from polities. The report first highlights research that has revealed the entanglements of race, immigration law, and citizenship before turning to ‘new immigrant destinations’ as central contemporary sites where race and belonging are hashed out. The following section examines the effects of anti-immigrant policing and racist politics on the health and well-being of immigrants. Activism and immigrant youth mobilization that challenge anti-immigrant politics and racist exclusions from citizenship are at the center of the arguments I discuss in the penultimate section. I conclude by calling for more geographic analysis of the racial-spatial politics of immigration, as well as of the activism that challenges such politics.