Paper short abstract:

Through the lens of 'people as infrastructure' (Simone 2004), this paper considers dynamics between recent arrivals and long-term residents in a historic site of arrival, Pumwani, Nairobi, with the aim of reflecting on infrastructures of care and belonging beyond the notion of 'integration'.

Paper long abstract:

Arrival cities are often presumed to be global ones in northern countries. Here, I focus on Nairobi, specifically Pumwani, the first residential estate established for Africans during the colonial era. Pumwani is perhaps the only place where residents identify as being from Nairobi; at the same time, it is a place where many stay temporarily. With its mix of religion, ethnicity, nationality, and legal status, Pumwani's population is 'super-diverse'. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, I focus on two interlocutors -- a recent arrival and a long-term resident -- whose experiences reveal overlapping spheres of belonging and care rooted in kinship, shared residence, and religion. At once resilient and fragile, these networks highlight how 'people as infrastructure' (Simone 2004) engage with disruptive conditions, including displacement following local development initiatives, the violence of (inter-)national security operations, and material deprivation, alongside which residents are raising their children and aspiring to futures different from the present. In doing so, I reflect on infrastructures of care and belonging beyond the notion of 'integration' in Nairobi, Kenya.

Paper short abstract:

This paper takes 3 ethnographic moments from long-term fieldwork carried out in a Brazilian Saturday School in London to describe the affective spaces, shared visions and embodied practices that together make up supplementary schools set up by transnational immigrant communities.

Paper long abstract:

At an end-of-year party in a Brazilian Saturday school in North London, a British father tried to explain to me how this place made him feel. He had been living in Brazil for some years, and recently returned with his wife to the UK. There is a word in Portuguese, he told me: Afastado – it means feeling ‘removed’, like being in a party where you do not know anyone. That’s the ‘Afastado’. That is how they felt on returning to the UK. This Saturday morning school makes them feel at home.

Based on long-term fieldwork carried out in a Brazilian supplementary school, this paper considers how these neighbourhood-based projects create familial spaces of belonging, recognition, connectivity and cultural continuity.

Supplementary schools make new spaces for teaching children their home languages and cultural heritage in migration. Here, cultural heritage amounts to ways of doing that include dressing, cooking, dancing, talking and socialising (Sontum 2021).

Based in insecure premises and responding to ever-increasing rent costs, supplementary schools transform rented classrooms and community halls within a very short time. As well as celebrating traditional festivals and dances (e.g. Festa Junina) supplementary school practitioners also perform cultural heritage in motion in the way they have to pack up, put things away and evacuate buildings on a regular basis.

In London, a city that is paradoxically very transnational yet steeped in its own traditions, supplementary schools offer an alternative theory of place in motion, and a city guide from a transnational immigrant community’s perspective.

Paper short abstract:

For many young people in Uganda labour migration has become a part of growing up. We trace the experience of 12 young male and female migrants (aged 17-24 years) over their first year in a town in southern Uganda. For nearly all, making friends was a marker of beginning to feel they belonged.

Paper long abstract:

For many young people in Uganda labour migration has become a part of growing up. A young person may look for work repairing vehicles, selling foodstuffs, doing domestic work or serving in a bar or restaurant. They may not move far, but it is still a move away from a place they belong, where family members live. While some move to stay with a relative, or a friend already in the new place, others may have few if any contacts and need to `make it’ for themselves. For young migrants the route to economic independence may be precarious, even for those who have people they know nearby when a job cannot be found or wages are not paid, or new friends exploit a newcomer’s naïveté, leading perhaps to sexual exploitation or expensive gambling bills. In this paper we trace the experience of 12 young male and female migrants (aged 17-24 years) over their first year in a town in southern Uganda. Finding friends who could help find jobs, lend them money and be around to relax with, fulfilled an expressed need to belong. That friendship was often based on a shared interest in sport or through their place of work; these friends were not necessarily people with whom they shared much about their lives. Even so, in a setting where all the young people had at some point experienced hunger, insecurity and a fear of failing to make it, those friendships were a marker of beginning to feel they belonged.

Paper short abstract:

Tracking the ways in which Moscow's religious landscape is being renewed by the developing community of Buddhism's followers. Observing the forms of new religious communities - both real-life and imaginary - in the dynamic global city and their relations with the community of local mainstream church

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I’d like to track the ways in which Moscow's religious landscape is being renewed by the developing community of Buddhism's followers, framing this case within the optics of “global”. The new religious movements and alternative spirituality has been recently coming into the focus of urban landscape researchers (De Boeck, Fawaz, Srinivas). Thus, this paper is aiming to observe the emergence and functioning of new religious spaces in the dynamic global city in order to identify its origin, position and form as a part of the local landscape. As for the empirical material of the research, I’m concentrating on the sites and spaces – both physical and imaginary – created by non-ethnic Buddhist converts in Moscow, a global city having no historical ties with the religion. My fieldwork was carried out both in offline- and online-communities of all the Buddhist schools represented in the city, all of which emerged from five to ten years ago. Brad Weiss’s concept of imagination and Anna Tsing’s concept of circulations provide a conceptual background for exploring the specifics of religion’s migration from Japan to Moscow and its nature in the new state. I assume that the landscape of Moscow – physical and imaginary – is being transformed by a new religious community.

Paper short abstract:

I explore the making and unmaking of two distinct, but related arrival infrastructures for migrants in Hamburg: the Lampedusa in Hamburg tent (2013-2020) and the Refugee Info Point (2022). Both infrastructures were built by and for migrants as an access point to the city.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I explore the making and unmaking of two distinct, but related arrival infrastructures for migrants in Hamburg: the Lampedusa in Hamburg tent, which existed from 2013 to 2020, and the Refugee Info Point that existed for about six months in 2022. Both infrastructures were built by and for migrants as an access point to the city of Hamburg. While the Lampedusa-tent was a specific site for activists advocating for regularization of their status in Hamburg, the Refugee Info Point was focused specifically on the needs of African migrants fleeing from the war in Ukraine, who would be at risk at experiencing marginalization in Germany.

By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hamburg between 2017 and 2022, I show that continued engagement with these arrival infrastructures enables a critical discussion of notions of infrastructures as manifest and fixed. Drawing on notions of edges as proposed by urbanist Suzanne M. Hall (2021) I explore how these infrastructures, which are positioned at the margins of society, create new “zones of interaction” (Howitt 2001) in which positionality and power are continuously negotiated. The focus on edges thus speaks to the dynamic landscape in which hospitality and hostility towards migrants existed simultaneously in the urban space of Hamburg. This approach strives to contribute to a practice-oriented and processual understanding of the notion of infrastructures.