CfP: Special issue on Pandemic Urban Citizenship: Cities, Migrants, and Covid-19 Crisis

The proposed special issue examines the pandemic’s impact on migrants in cities through the concept of urban (migrant) citizenship. We find the concept ongoingly productive thanks to both, the ongoing urbanization of citizenship (Fogelman 2018), and the persistence of the emancipatory potential of the concept (Avni et al. 2019). While the special issue wishes to contribute more broadly to the nexus between migration and urban studies (Chacko & Price 2021; Nicholls & Uitermark 2016; Cohen et al. 2022), its most immediate contribution is to the field of urban migrant citizenship. The latter has seen a renewed interest in recent years, focusing on and often integrating policy and practice-centred perspectives (Brändle 2020; Mepschen 2019; Kandylis 2017; Cohen & Margalit 2015), that examine how migrants’ citizenship is governed, lived, claimed, and struggled over in and through cities. This second generation of urban migrant citizenship scholarship thus goes beyond the normative and legal-theoretical perspectives dominant in earlier phases (Bauböck 2003).

Our theoretical contribution is aimed at understanding the impacts of the pandemic as an example of an acute, societal crisis on migrants’ short- and medium-term rights and recognition in – and by – the city. While previous crises brought about major transformations in urban material landscapes, little is known about less immediately tangible transformations. Crises are, however, often assumed to abound with a potential for bringing about new and progressive reorientations of policies and practices. Such assumptions, including in relation to the emergence of new practices of solidarity towards migrants (Vaiou & Klandides 2017) or transformation of ideas about their belonging in the city (Zavos et al 2017), have been borne out in some contexts and some crises. Still in others, such transformations – if they happen – may be more ambivalent. Against this backdrop, the articles in this special issue will investigate practices and impacts of urban actors, such as municipalities or solidarity movements, on migrants, as well as migrants’own perspectives.

The guest editors Tatiana Fogelman (Roskilde University, Denmark) and Nir Cohen (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) are looking for two or three papers specifically from the Global South (eg Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, MENA, or SE Asia) and/or those deploying quantitative methods to round off our proposal for a special issue on the pandemic urban citizenship, recently given initial positive consideration in one of the leading urban journals. Pls see the mini-excerpt from our proposal for a brief description. Interested parties should send a 300-word abstract and a short biosketch to fogelman@ruc.dk and nir.cohen@biu.ac.il by October 30, 2022. Please note that the submission deadline for the full papers to the editors will be April 1, 2023.