Walter J Nicholls
Biographic Data
| ID | 179273 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Walter J Nicholls |
| GIVEN NAMES | Walter J |
| FAMILY NAME | Nicholls |
| SIGNATURE | NICHOLLS W J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4589-5082 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 68 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 960 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Why now, why here: A conjunctural theory of socialist advance in big city America
Socialist electoral formations are advancing in large, knowledge-economy American cities while remaining absent from more peripheral economic spaces, and now, rather than two decades ago, when inequality and labor militancy were arguably more acute. This paper explains that uneven geography by operationalizing Gramsci’s distinction between organic and conjunctural conditions for cross-city comparison, charting a course between the universalizing …
Insurgent bureaucrats in local government: The fight for immigrant rights and racial equity
This article examines how marginalized bureaucrats transform into collective actors, “insurgent bureaucrats,” who advance equity and social justice within local government. Drawing on field theory and a case study of Mayville, California, we analyze how bureaucrats in a newly created Office of Equity formed networks and mounted challenges against dominant forces in the bureaucratic field. We identify five key elements explaining this transformati…
Then they came for the cities: Radical geography's puzzling silence in the summer of fascism
This paper examines the silence of critical and radical geographers during the Trump administration's 2025 federal occupations of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., Despite decades of theoretical development around urban sovereignty and spatial resistance, scholars remained largely absent from public discourse during unprecedented military interventions. Analysis of academic responses reveals California universities dominated engagement while Nort…
The pincer movement: How middle-class homeowners overcome restrictions and block density
Inverted Mobilizations: Pro- And Anti-Immigrant Activism in Orange County
Pro-immigrant advocates mobilizing in Orange County, California, between 2010 and 2018 had access to more financial and organizational resources than anti-immigrant advocates. Despite these advantages, the anti-immigrant side achieved more policy wins in Orange County. This paper argues that the case of Orange County indicates inverted mobilizations, where asymmetries on the other side counterbalance asymmetries on one side. Anti-immigrant advoca…
Bureaucratic Politicisation and Insurgent Bureaucrats: A Theoretical Framework
Municipal bureaucrats in the United States—mostly on the social side of the state (e.g. public health, welfare, educators, housing, and sometimes urban planners) but not exclusively so (e.g. district attorney offices)—have shown growing willingness to engage in political battles within the bureaucracy, connect with social movements, and construct oppositional identities centred on social and racial justice. Critical urban theories of the state hi…
Sanctuary for All' or 'Sanctuary for the Deserving: How Municipal Bureaucracies Mediate and Decide Contentious Struggles over Urban Citizenship
During the late 2010s, pro-immigrant activists in the politically progressive municipality of Mayville, California (pseudonym) mounted a campaign to enact a radically egalitarian sanctuary city policy ("sanctuary for all") that would have changed the boundaries of urban citizenship. The campaign crafted compelling and resonant mobilization frames, constructed a broad and diverse coalition, won the support of large majorities of the public, and ta…
La gouvernance des immigrés à l’échelle de la ville: Le concept d’« adminigration »
Cet entretien revient sur le concept d’ « adminigration » avec Susan Coutin et Walter Nicholls, professeurs à l’université de Californie à Irvine. Les deux chercheurs expliquent la pertinence de ce concept qu’ils définissent comme « la gouvernance des immigrés par le biais de politiques et de programmes à l’échelle de la ville, qu’ils soient ou non explicitement axés sur les immigrés »
The contradictory field of community organizing in the United States: A theoretical framework
The urban studies and planning literatures largely conceive of community organizations as either clients of neoliberal regimes or the advocates of marginalized communities. Whereas the first emphasizes structural constraints, the latter focuses on the conditions that permit organizations to exercise agency in planning arenas. This theoretical paper suggests that both frameworks reveal important mechanisms but belie the contradictory pressures fac…
Adminigration: City-Level Governance of Immigrant Community Members
The concept of adminigration provides a much-needed lens in theorizing immigration enforcement, citizenship, and urban geographies. We define adminigration as the governance of immigrant community members through city-level policies and programs, whether or not these explicitly focus on immigrants. Our focus on adminigration involves three theoretical interventions: (1) bridging literature on immigrant bureaucratic incorporation and crimmigration…
The Swarm versus the Grassroots: Places and networks of supporters and opponents of Black Lives Matter on Twitter
While activists have effectively used the #blacklivesmatter hashtag to organize protests against police brutality and racism, this success has also drawn out many who use the hashtag to express their opposition. How do supporters of the Movement for Black Lives and their opponents coordinate on Twitter? Drawing on a corpus of 18.5 million tweets, this paper compares coordination among supporters and opponents of #blacklivesmatter in terms of rela…
Contentious immigration politics in a multijurisdictional field: A case study of Orange County, California
Representational Hierarchies in Social Movements: A Case Study of the Undocumented Immigrant Youth Movement
During the late 2010s, the undocumented immigrant youth movement embraced inclusive and intersectional representations. Directly impacted activists deconstructed language and symbolic categories that excluded. However, their movement continued to stratify activists along representational lines. This article combines theories of intersectionality and symbolic power to develop the concept of “representational hierarchy.” Producing representations r…
Suburban battles over immigration: A case study of local day labourer policies
Over the past thirty years, there has been an increase in the number of immigrant day labourers in the United States. The presence of day labourers has led to numerous conflicts in municipalities. Some locals benefit from the labour performed by day labourers and believe they do no harm, while others see them as “illegal” immigrants that pose a threat to the community. For many, the legitimacy of day labourers remains uncertain, which opens a spa…
Municipal institutions and local policy responses to immigrants: Policies towards day labourers in California
This paper examines the various factors that influence how local elected officials (mayors and council persons) in the United States develop policy responses to immigrant day labourers in their jurisdictions. We argue that in addition to demographic and political factors, the design of municipal political institutions shapes their responses. Inclusive day labourer policies are more likely to occur in mayor–council systems than in council–manager …
Dynamics of Distinction and Solidarity within Social Movements: Explaining Relations between Privileged and Underprivileged Groups in the U.S. Immigrant Rights Movement
Undocumented immigrant youths, known as the Dreamers, rose to exceptional prominence in the American immigrant rights movement in the 2000s and 2010s. The Dreamers had considerable success in presenting themselves as assimilated and hard-working patriots worthy of regularization. While this strategy worked well in the media and politics, it also created a distance between the Dreamers and less privileged groups of undocumented immigrants. In 2013…
The Uneven Geographies of Politicisation: The Case of the Undocumented Immigrant Youth Movement in the United States
This paper examines the uneven geographies of politicisation through the case of the undocumented immigrant youth movement in the United States, known as the Dreamers. Engaging the “urban political” literature, the paper maintains that politicisation involves the constitution of a subject that disrupts the order through claims for equality. The paper identifies the process of transforming highly marginalised and repressed people into an actual di…
Undocumented Immigrant Activism and the Political: Disrupting the Order or Reproducing the Status Quo
Scholarly interest in undocumented migrants’ struggles over citizenship has surged in recent years. Critical, theoretically inspired scholarship on the political has embraced these struggles as evidence that the current order can be disrupted. However, empirical studies of undocumented activism in the United States and Europe have revealed that pressures to conform to dominant norms and discourses, representational oligarchies and categorical fra…
A virtuous nation and its deserving immigrants. How the immigrant rights movement embraced nationalism
Immigrants, and particularly undocumented immigrants, are oftentimes seen as disrupting the nation state and destabilizing its boundaries. This paper develops the argument that immigrants can, under certain conditions, actively employ nationalist frames and language to support their rights claims. It presents a two-prong argument to explain for this outcome. First, immigrant rights advocates needed to select a ‘master frame’ that would will reson…
Local Path Dependency and Scale Shift in Social Movements: The Case of the us Immigrant Rights Movement
This paper examines how social movement organizations shift scale through the case of the immigrant rights movement. This was largely a local movement for the first decades of its existence. However, in the late 1990s, repressive federal policies increased the salience of national politics for many organizations. While recognizing the importance of national politics, many organizations remained mostly engaged in local politics for nearly a decade…
The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate
No Tyson in Tongie!”: The Battle to Protect a Rural Way of Life in Kansas
Political mobilizations in small towns have come to play a disproportionate role in today’s national politics. This article examines the conditions giving rise to small‐town mobilizations through an in‐depth case study of Tonganoxie, Kansas. Residents of this town mounted a massive campaign to block the opening of a Tyson chicken processing plant in 2017. The article draws on interviews, observations, a newspaper claims database, and extractions …
Going national: How the Fight for Immigrant Rights Became a National Social Movement
The immigrant rights movement in the United States evolved from largely localised and grassroots struggles in the 1990s into a coherent and coordinated national social movement in the late 2000s and 2010s. Scaling up in this way is challenging because grassroots organisations tend to lack the resources needed to operate at the national level over an extended period. This paper examines how this movement overcame the obstacle by focusing on role o…
The Immigrant Rights Movement: The Battle over National Citizenship
In the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, liberal outcry over ethnonationalist views promoted a vision of America as a nation of immigrants. Given the pervasiveness of this rhetoric, it can be easy to overlook the fact that the immigrant rights movement began in the US relatively recently. This book tells the story of its grassroots origins, through its meteoric rise to the national stage. Starting in the 1990s, the immigrant ri…
The Dark Side of Immigrant Integration Policies: Day Laborers in the United States
This article uses the case of immigrant day laborers to examine how municipalities develop policies to integrate immigrants. In the 1990s and 2000s, local elected officials adopted integration policies to address the issues raised by the presence of day laborers in their jurisdictions. While first drawing on cases from around the country, the study then homes in on the case of Pasadena, California, to examine the implementation of integration in …
Place, networks, space: Theorising the geographies of social movements
This essay examines how geography affects the different types of networks underlying social movements. The principal argument of the paper is that networks forged in particular places and at great distances play distinctive yet complementary functions in broad‐based social movements. Not only does the articulation of these different types of networks result in complementary roles, but it also introduces key relational dynamics affecting the stabi…
Cities and Social Movements: Theorizing beyond the Right to the City
Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city Cities breed contention.Social movements usually express themselves in cities, but cities have nevertheless been seen merely as a backdrop, as the empty canvas on which social movement activity unfolds.We maintain that the city is constitutive of social movements.The defi ning features of cities-density, size, and diversity (Wirth, 1938)-provide the basic elements for contention…
Spaces of Contention: Spatialities and Social Movements
Contents: Introduction: conceptualizing the spatialities of social movements, Walter Nicholls, Byron Miller and Justin Beaumont Part I Place and Space: Sites of Mobilization: Putting protest in place: contested and liberated spaces in three campaigns, Donatella della Porta, Maria Fabbri and Gianni Piazza The liberalization of free speech: or, how protest in public space is silenced, Don Mitchell Struggling to belong: social movements and the figh…
Social Movements in Urban Society: The City as A Space of Politicization
Recent anti-systemic social movements have illustrated the central role of cities in social movement mobilization. We not only highlight the characteristics of urban social relations that make cities fertile ground for mobilization, but also point to the disjunctures between the geographies and spatialities of social relations in the city, and the geographies and spatialities of many systemic processes. Struggles for a more just society must cons…
Making Undocumented Immigrants into a Legitimate Political Subject: Theoretical Observations from the United States and France
Over the last 20 years, the global North has witnessed the growing prominence of immigrant rights movements. This article examines how this highly stigmatized population has achieved a certain degree of legitimacy in hostile political environments. The central claim of the article is that this kind of legitimacy is initially achieved through the efforts of activists to represent undocumented immigrants in ways that resonate with the normative val…
The Urban Question Revisited: The Importance of Cities for Social Movements
What roles do cities play in fostering general social movements? This article maintains that cities facilitate particular types of relations that are good at making high-quality resources available to mobilizations operating at a variety of spatial scales. However, while large and complex urban systems may be well suited for these types of relations, whether they actually develop depends on the nature of local power relations between political au…
Fragmenting citizenship: Dynamics of cooperation and conflict in France's immigrant rights movement
This paper examines the contradictory relational dynamics of immigrant rights movement through a close examination of the French case during the 1990s. Through this movement, we find a network made up of different groups of immigrants and well-established rights organizations. As the movement intensified over the months, powerful cleavages developed between groups of undocumented immigrants (e.g. families, single men, etc.) and between certain im…
Migrant cities: Place, Power, and Voice in the Era of Super Diversity
Immigration scholars have long considered cities to be important environments that mediate how immigrants are incorporated into receiving countries. While most scholars recognise that cities have some importance, they continue to prioritise national-level institutions, organisations, networks, and cultural dynamics. This paper introduces the special issue on 'Migrant Cities'. The special issue asserts that cities are not simply backdrops where na…
From Politicization to Policing: The Rise and Decline of New Social Movements in Amsterdam and Paris
This paper analyzes the rise and decline of social movements in Amsterdam and Paris, focusing in particular on the organizations of left‐wing immigrant workers. These organizations performed crucial roles for new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s but were isolated and coopted in the 1990s and early 2000s. To explain why this is so, we engage in a dialogue with Jacques Rancière and develop an understanding of cities as strategic sites for bo…
The Geographies of Social Movements
This article aims to provide a review of how geographical concepts can help us better understand the development and effects of social movements. Geographers have been rather slow to analyze the specific processes and mechanisms that make it possible for people to cooperate and engage in sustained political struggles with rich and powerful adversaries. Not only has this inattention to social movements deprived the discipline of robust conceptual …
From political opportunities to niche-openings: The Dilemmas of Mobilizing for Immigrant Rights in Inhospitable Environments
Plural Governance, Participation and Democracy in Cities
In recent years there has been a growing interest in new participatory forms of urban governance. This introduction provides readers with a basic review of current debates in the literature and a summary of the articles presented in the symposium. The introduction highlights two major tensions in the literature. First, many scholars operate under an assumption that plural actors can achieve a lasting and rational consensus on certain issues. Othe…
The urbanisation of justice movements? Possibilities and constraints for the city as a space of contentious struggle
Have urban areas become strategic sites for the formation of justice movements? A justice movement is conceptualised as geographically extensive mobilisations that achieve a degree of territorial fixity at different spatial scales. It is proposed that a number of factors can encourage organisations implicated in this movement to make the urban arena a key front in their struggle to achieve justice. These factors include the intensification of urb…
How Local Networks Shape a Global Movement: Comparing Occupy in Amsterdam and Los Angeles
The Occupy encampments erupting around the world in Fall and Winter of 2011 developed into local platforms where activists from different milieus came together and forged relations and shared understandings. While Occupy protests broke out around the world in a synchronized fashion and used similar symbols and narratives, the protests were sustained by quite different local networks in different cities. We argue that the abilities of local Occupy…
Dreamers Unbound: Immigrant Youth Mobilizing
Post-Multicultural Cities: A Comparison of Minority Politics in Amsterdam and Los Angeles, 1970-2010
Amsterdam and Los Angeles show divergent trends in minority politics. In Los Angeles, minority organisations that were divided along ethnic lines in the 1960s and 1970s joined together in a broad alliance for social justice in the 1980s and 1990s. In Amsterdam, by contrast, minority organisations became increasingly divided. Whereas, in the 1970s and 1980s, minority organisations were central actors in a broad alliance for social justice, they we…
Between Relationality and Territoriality: Investigating the Geographies of Justice Movements in the Netherlands and the United States
This paper examines the geographies of justice movements in Rotterdam in The Netherlands and Los Angeles in the United States. In their wider national and international frameworks movements in both countries continue to contest unjust forms of urbanization characterized by neoliberal initiatives that undermine the socioeconomic status of low-income residents. These movements are constituted by relations that stretch across several geographical le…
Introduction: Planning/resistance
For years urban planning has been understood as a government instrument to rationalize space, populations, and the conduct of residents. This view is consistent with recent discussions of the “post-political” city. As the introduction of the special issue on Planning / Resistance, this paper takes a different view. It examines the politicizing effects of planning. It argues that planning conceives and implements the orderly city by imposing lines…
The networked grassroots. How radicals outflanked reformists in the United States' immigrant rights movement
This paper accounts for important shifts in the debate on immigration reform by considering the geographies of protest. Our findings point to the importance of urban hubs of activists and organisations that have worked with one another over extended periods of time. While these urban hubs constitute distinctive activist worlds, they have also connected to one another and coordinated nation-wide actions through a variety of networks (social media,…
Forging a 'new' organizational infrastructure for Los Angeles' progressive community
What margins of maneuverability do urban-based progressive movements have for affecting policy outcomes in entrepreneurial and neoliberal political systems? This article provides a partial answer to this question by examining how relations developed and stabilized between actors in the different sectors (community based organizations, labor, university) of Los Angeles' progressive community. Such relations are a necessary but not sufficient condi…
The Politics of Deservingness: Comparing Youth-Centered Immigrant Mobilizations in the Netherlands and the United States
In the late 2000s, campaigns arose in the Netherlands and the United States advocating for the legal residency of immigrant youths with precarious legal status. In spite of differences between the campaigns, advocates argued that youths possessed certain cultural attributes and that these attributes made them deserving of permanent residency status. These two campaigns had very different histories, were made up of very different stakeholders, and…
Politicizing Undocumented Immigrants One Corner at a Time: How Day Laborers Became a Politically Contentious Group
This article examines how undocumented immigrants become politicized and evolved into a relatively powerful group in the United States. It does so by examining the evolution of day laborers from their humble beginnings in a Los Angeles suburb in the early 1990s into an important component of the national immigrant rights movement today. It addresses the issue by examining the strategic importance of the 'urban' in enabling stigmatized individuals…
Planning for social justice: Strategies, dilemmas, tradeoffs
This article charts predicaments and conundrums associated with the ambition to plan for social justice. Drawing from classical theory on the roles of intellectuals, we identify what we call the “power of representation dilemma.” This dilemma arises because the credentials, knowledge, and skills of intellectuals (like urban planners) make them into powerful agents of social justice but at the same time can put them in a position of power in relat…
Building protest online: Engagement with the digitally networked #not1more protest campaign on Twitter
This article examines engagement with digitally networked, politically contentious actions. Maintaining engagement over time is a key challenge for social movements attempting to network digitally. This article argues that proximity serves as a condition to address this challenge, because it configures the personal networks upon which transmission depends. This is a paradox of digital activism: it has the capacity to transcend barriers; however, …
Associationalism from Above: Explaining Failure through France's Politique de la Ville
Over the past 20 years, states have attempted to develop partnerships with third-sector associations in a variety of policy areas. Advocates argued that these types of partnership would increase the state's capacities to target the needs of niche populations, strengthen associational sectors and democratise state bureaucracies. However, several studies have shown that state-initiated partnerships often fall well short of their desired objectives …
Poverty Regimes and the Constraints on Urban Democratic Politics: Lessons from Toulouse, France
Do policy communities designed to manage urban poverty (poverty regime) constrain the democratic opportunities found in cities? Recent investigations have targeted urban civil societies as particularly strategic arenas for generating democratic opportunities. In particular, the associational sector of cities has been viewed as a strategic site for forming citizens in relative autonomy of market and state forces, and for sustaining a plural set of…
Forging a 'new' organizational infrastructure for Los Angeles' progressive community
What margins of maneuverability do urban-based progressive movements have for affecting policy outcomes in entrepreneurial and neoliberal political systems? This article provides a partial answer to this question by examining how relations developed and stabilized between actors in the different sectors (community based organizations, labor, university) of Los Angeles' progressive community. Such relations are a necessary but not sufficient condi…
The urbanisation of justice movements? Possibilities and constraints for the city as a space of contentious struggle
Have urban areas become strategic sites for the formation of justice movements? A justice movement is conceptualised as geographically extensive mobilisations that achieve a degree of territorial fixity at different spatial scales. It is proposed that a number of factors can encourage organisations implicated in this movement to make the urban arena a key front in their struggle to achieve justice. These factors include the intensification of urb…
Power and Governance: Metropolitan Governance in France
The system of metropolitan governance in France has undergone a series of rather dramatic changes over the past 40 years. Where central cities and their powerful mayors once enjoyed a privileged position over other territorial actors, they now find themselves depending upon these other authorities to fulfil many basic governance tasks. Moreover, a layer of organisations, agencies and networks has formed to co-ordinate the collective action of the…
Between Growth and Exclusion in Technopolis: Managing Inequalities in Toulouse, France
As high technology development has created important resources and opportunities for some residents of cities, it has also introduced a new set of barriers and constraints for others. The new inequalities resulting from this pathway of economic development present local public officials with important challenges for managing their cities. This article argues that local strategies to confront inequalities in high technology cities are dependent on…
Associationalism from Above: Explaining Failure through France's Politique de la Ville
Over the past 20 years, states have attempted to develop partnerships with third-sector associations in a variety of policy areas. Advocates argued that these types of partnership would increase the state's capacities to target the needs of niche populations, strengthen associational sectors and democratise state bureaucracies. However, several studies have shown that state-initiated partnerships often fall well short of their desired objectives …
Power to the Periphery: Suburban Empowerment in Toulouse, France
Much of the scholarship on the empowerment of suburbs ('edge city', 'ex-urb', and so on) focuses on American cases and draws upon social and economic variables to explain the phenomenon. In this paper I aim to broaden the empirical reach of the literature by examining the transformation of several municipalities from rural backwaters into powerful political and economic forces in Toulouse, France. I also aim to broaden existing theoretical approa…
The Geographies of Social Movements
This article aims to provide a review of how geographical concepts can help us better understand the development and effects of social movements. Geographers have been rather slow to analyze the specific processes and mechanisms that make it possible for people to cooperate and engage in sustained political struggles with rich and powerful adversaries. Not only has this inattention to social movements deprived the discipline of robust conceptual …
Between Relationality and Territoriality: Investigating the Geographies of Justice Movements in the Netherlands and the United States
This paper examines the geographies of justice movements in Rotterdam in The Netherlands and Los Angeles in the United States. In their wider national and international frameworks movements in both countries continue to contest unjust forms of urbanization characterized by neoliberal initiatives that undermine the socioeconomic status of low-income residents. These movements are constituted by relations that stretch across several geographical le…
Investigating the Geographies of Justice Movements
Investigating the geographies of justice movementsThe papers presented in this theme issue of Environment and Planning A investigate the geographies of justice movements in theory and practice.The aim is to provide readers with (1) new insights, in general, into the spatial constitution of social movements, and (2) more specifically an attempt to link traditional interest in social and spatial justice among geographers with the recent wave of res…
Place, networks, space: Theorising the geographies of social movements
This essay examines how geography affects the different types of networks underlying social movements. The principal argument of the paper is that networks forged in particular places and at great distances play distinctive yet complementary functions in broad‐based social movements. Not only does the articulation of these different types of networks result in complementary roles, but it also introduces key relational dynamics affecting the stabi…
Plural Governance, Participation and Democracy in Cities
In recent years there has been a growing interest in new participatory forms of urban governance. This introduction provides readers with a basic review of current debates in the literature and a summary of the articles presented in the symposium. The introduction highlights two major tensions in the literature. First, many scholars operate under an assumption that plural actors can achieve a lasting and rational consensus on certain issues. Othe…
The Urban Question Revisited: The Importance of Cities for Social Movements
What roles do cities play in fostering general social movements? This article maintains that cities facilitate particular types of relations that are good at making high-quality resources available to mobilizations operating at a variety of spatial scales. However, while large and complex urban systems may be well suited for these types of relations, whether they actually develop depends on the nature of local power relations between political au…
World City ‐ by Doreen Massey
The Los Angeles School: Difference, Politics, City
In the early 1980s, urban researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California embarked on a concerted effort to study and theorize the Los Angeles region. Their efforts resulted in a number of important theoretical and empirical writings that helped many rethink the ways in which contemporary cities work. Highlighting these contributions and examining how they inform our understandings of differenc…
Cities and the Unevenness of Social Movement Space: The Case of France's Immigrant Rights Movement
This paper analyzes the formation of a 'social movement space' through the case of France's immigrant rights movement. Rather than this movement developing on the head of a pin, the French immigrant rights movement displays a rich and varied geography that changed over time. The movement emerged through a series of urban struggles and Paris early on became a center of these mobilizations. The complex and empowering networks developed in Paris wer…
How Local Networks Shape a Global Movement: Comparing Occupy in Amsterdam and Los Angeles
The Occupy encampments erupting around the world in Fall and Winter of 2011 developed into local platforms where activists from different milieus came together and forged relations and shared understandings. While Occupy protests broke out around the world in a synchronized fashion and used similar symbols and narratives, the protests were sustained by quite different local networks in different cities. We argue that the abilities of local Occupy…
Governing immigrants and citizenship regimes: The case of France, 1950s-1990s
Does sustained and increasingly transnational immigration weaken the national character of citizenship regimes? This paper addresses this issue by examining French responses to immigration over a 40-year period. In spite of the changing character of immigration and changing state strategies, all governments throughout this period have sought to maintain the national character by making full access to rights contingent on one's conformity to natio…
The Urban Roots of Anti-Neoliberal Social Movements: The Case of Athens, Greece
The recent rounds of anti-neoliberal mobilizations in Europe have shown to be rooted in cities. Whereas Madrid has become a central hub in Spain's social movement, Athens has assumed a central and centralizing role in Greece. Through a case study on Athens, Greece, this paper aims to show how cities have become the driving force of these national movements. The argument maintains that political institutional factors and local networking processes…
Cities and Social Movements: Theorizing beyond the Right to the City
Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city Cities breed contention.Social movements usually express themselves in cities, but cities have nevertheless been seen merely as a backdrop, as the empty canvas on which social movement activity unfolds.We maintain that the city is constitutive of social movements.The defi ning features of cities-density, size, and diversity (Wirth, 1938)-provide the basic elements for contention…
Constructing Illegality in America: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses
The topic of 'illegal' immigration has been a major aspect of public discourse in the United States and many other immigrant-receiving countries. From the beginning of its modern invocation in the early twentieth century, the often ill-defined epithet of human 'illegality' has figured prominently in the media; in vigorous public debates at the national, state, and local levels; and in presidential campaigns. In this collection of essays, contribu…
Social Movements in Urban Society: The City as A Space of Politicization
Recent anti-systemic social movements have illustrated the central role of cities in social movement mobilization. We not only highlight the characteristics of urban social relations that make cities fertile ground for mobilization, but also point to the disjunctures between the geographies and spatialities of social relations in the city, and the geographies and spatialities of many systemic processes. Struggles for a more just society must cons…
Post-Multicultural Cities: A Comparison of Minority Politics in Amsterdam and Los Angeles, 1970-2010
Amsterdam and Los Angeles show divergent trends in minority politics. In Los Angeles, minority organisations that were divided along ethnic lines in the 1960s and 1970s joined together in a broad alliance for social justice in the 1980s and 1990s. In Amsterdam, by contrast, minority organisations became increasingly divided. Whereas, in the 1970s and 1980s, minority organisations were central actors in a broad alliance for social justice, they we…
Making Undocumented Immigrants into a Legitimate Political Subject: Theoretical Observations from the United States and France
Over the last 20 years, the global North has witnessed the growing prominence of immigrant rights movements. This article examines how this highly stigmatized population has achieved a certain degree of legitimacy in hostile political environments. The central claim of the article is that this kind of legitimacy is initially achieved through the efforts of activists to represent undocumented immigrants in ways that resonate with the normative val…
Fragmenting citizenship: Dynamics of cooperation and conflict in France's immigrant rights movement
This paper examines the contradictory relational dynamics of immigrant rights movement through a close examination of the French case during the 1990s. Through this movement, we find a network made up of different groups of immigrants and well-established rights organizations. As the movement intensified over the months, powerful cleavages developed between groups of undocumented immigrants (e.g. families, single men, etc.) and between certain im…
Political science (60 works) · Sociology (56 works) · Law (55 works) · Politics (53 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (33 works) · Immigration (32 works) · Political economy (32 works) · Law (31 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (25 works) · Social movement (20 works)