Urban refugees now account for over half the total number of refugees worldwide. Yet to date, far more research has been done on refugees living in camps and settlements set up expressly for them. This book provides crucial insights into the worldwide phenomenon of refugee flows into urban settings, repercussions for those seeking protection, and the agencies and organizations tasked to assist them. It provides a comparative exploration of refugees and asylum seekers in nine urban areas in Africa, Asia and Europe to examine issues such as status recognition, international and national...

Over recent years there has been a surge of interest in postsecularity. The complex blurring of sacred-secular boundaries has found new expression in particular areas of the public life of cities, with the unexpected resilience and mutation of religion as a powerful political, cultural and global force.

This book offers new insights on the concept of postsecularity and the associated idea of the postsecular city and public sphere. It provides a detailed account of how emergent postsecularity co-produces key spaces and subjectivities in contemporary urban life, as well as...

This book offers a unique contribution, exploring how the intersections among migrants and radical squatter s movements have evolved over past decades. The complexity and importance of squatting practices are analyzed from a bottom-up perspective, to demonstrate how the spaces of squatting can be transformed by migrants. With contributions from scholars, scholar-activists, and activists, this book provides unique insights into how squatting has offered an alternative to dominant anti-immigrant policies, and the implications of squatting on the social acceptance of migrants. It illustrates...

There have been significant developments in the state of psychological, neuroscientific and behavioural scientific knowledge relating to the human mind, brain, action and decision-making over the past two decades. These developments have influenced public policy making and popular culture in the UK and elsewhere through policies and emerging social practices focussed on behavioural change, happiness, wellbeing, therapy, resilience and character. Yet little attention has been paid to examining the wider political and ethical significance of the widespread use of psychological governance...

As with so many facets of contemporary western life, architecture and space are often experienced and understood as a commodity or product. The premise of this book is to offer alternatives to the practices and values of such westernised space and Architecture (with a capital A), by exploring the participatory and grass-roots practices used in alternative development models in the Global South. This process re-contextualises the spaces, values, and relationships produced by such alternative methods of development and social agency. It asks whether such spatial practices provide concrete...

This book explores the use of creative practices, in particular, theatre, as a platform for enabling new research methodologies and spaces in which to practice politics. It offers insights into the use of theatre as a medium to disseminate research to the wider public and extend the terrain of political debate in productive ways. The book explores debates within transnational feminism and transnational justice to offer new perspectives on affect and performance. It also engages with theory on the liveliness of material objects as actors in networks of knowledge production. In particular,...

Recent global events, including the Arab Spring uprisings, Occupy movements and anti-austerity protests across Europe have renewed scholarly and public interest in collective action, protest strategies and activist subcultures. We know that social movements do not just contest and politicise culture, they create it too. However, scholars working within international politics and social movement studies have been relatively inattentive to the manifold political mediations of graffiti, muralism, street performance and other street art forms.

Against this backdrop, this book...

The extension of border controls beyond a country s territory to regulate the flows of migrants before they arrive has become a popular and highly controversial policy practice. Today, remote control policies are more visible, complex and widespread than ever before, raising various ethical, political and legal issues for the governments promoting them.

The book examines the externalization of migration control from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, focusing on remote control initiatives in Europe and North America, with contributions from the fields of politics,...

There has been an increasing public, and academic, interest in questions of political resistance in the social sciences. Scholarly engagement with such questions too often relies on a taken-for-granted set of theoretical assumptions, grounded in familiar perspectives, against which practices of resistance are then read, and judged, in a binary manner. There is an urgent need for a novel innovative theoretical approach that is able to think outside the box of established academic disciplines and theoretical schools of thought. This book offers this corrective through the lens of...

Were the occupations of 2010-11 - from Spain to Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street - a success or failure? Are they the model for urban radical politics? This book challenges common understandings and underlying assumptions of what constitutes activism and resistance. It proposes a critical urban theory of politics and citizenship that is grounded in the city as it is inhabited. For those who are marginalized, the city is a double-edged sword of oppression and emancipation.

This book argues for an intersectional approach that actively dismantles hierarchies and embraces a wider...