Creating SpaCe For CitizenShip: The Liminal Politics of Undocumented Activism thomas swerts abstractSince the turn of the century, urban scholars have argued that cities are the sites par excellence where new political subjects are emerging and changing the face of citizen ship. Undocumented activism is often invoked as an example of this phenomenon and an object of renewed interest. What remains unclear, however, is how these precarious actors, who are barred from institutional channels for voicing their grievances and who have little access to resources, become political. This article argues that the urban interstices--or the spaces in between legality and illegality, visibility and invisibility and formality and informality--offer strategic opportunities for undocumented activism. I introduce a theo retical understanding of liminal politics that focuses on the spatial and symbolic prac tices by means of which the undocumented, who find themselves betwixt and between statuses, develop innovative methods of political expression. Based on a multisited ethnography, I demonstrate that undocumented activists craft urban space as a 'backstage' as well as a 'frontstage' for their struggles over citizenship. On the one hand, undocumented immi grants build safe spaces in which they can (re)imagine their subjectivities and develop political scripts. On the other hand, they stage and enact these political scripts by appropri ating public space. This study therefore highlights the spatiality, theatricality and perfor mativity of emerging forms of urban citizenship.

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 fragmentation can lead activists to reproduce rather than disrupt the order. The papers in this symposium aim to advance this discussion by comparing the findings of case studies of undocumented immigrant struggles around the world. In this introduction to the symposium, we argue that disruption and reproduction constitute two logics of collective action that continually express themselves in immigrant rights mobilisations. We present a framework that outlines how undocumented activists navigate both logics in their ongoing quest to construct subjects, acts and spaces capable of disrupting the status quo.

In recent years, undocumented youth have come out of the shadows to claim their rights in the United States. By sharing their stories, these youth gained a voice in the public debate. This article integrates insights from the literature on narratives and emotions to study how story-telling is employed within the undocumented youth movement in Chicago. I argue that undocumented youth strategically use storytelling for diverging purposes depending on the context, type of interaction, and audience involved. Based on ethnographic research, I show that storytelling allows them to incorporate new members, mobilize constituencies, and legitimize grievances. In each of these contexts, emotions play a key role in structuring the social transaction between storyteller and audience. Storytelling is thus a community-building, mobilizing, and claims-making practice in social movements. At a broader level, this case study demonstrates the power of storytelling as a political tool for marginalized populations.

Critical scholarship on “the promise‐of‐the‐political” thesis customarily understands undocumented migrant struggles (UMS) as being politically disruptive. However, the question of what gets disrupted, how, by whom, and to what effect tends to be ignored. Building on insights from the empirical literature on UMS and ethnographic research of the “Solidarity March With and Without Papers”, this paper argues that three conditions need to be in place for UMS to be disruptive. First, undocumented activists need to craft collective intentions to challenge the institutional order in and through joint action. Second, protest acts need to effectively interrupt everyday routines symbolising the status quo and instigate replication. Third, UMS need to unsettle and force a response from the order in ways that defy existing institutional logics. These findings are translated into a research agenda that proposes to investigate the relative importance of collective intentionality, inaugural performativity and institutional receptivity for UMS.

Cities have become important sites of sanctuary for migrants with a precarious legal status. While many national governments in Europe have adopted restrictive immigration policies, urban governments have undertaken measures to safeguard undocumented residents’ rights. Existing scholarship on sanctuary cities has mostly focused on how cities’ stance against federal immigration policies can be interpreted as urban citizenship. What is largely missing in these debates, however, is a better insight into the role that local civil society actors play in pushing for sanctuary and negotiating the terms of social in- and exclusion. In this article, we rely on a qualitative study of the 2017 Sanctuary City campaign in Liège, Belgium, to argue that power relations between (and among) civil society actors and city officials help to explain why the meaning and inclusiveness of ‘sanctuary’ shifted over time. Initially, radical activists were able to politicize the issue by demanding the social inclusion of the ‘sans-papiers’ through grassroots mobilization. However, the cooptation of the campaign by immigrant rights organizations led to the adoption of a motion wherein the local government depicted the city as a ‘welcoming’ instead of a ‘sanctuary’ city. By showing how immigrant rights professionals sidelined radical activists during the campaign, we highlight the risk of depoliticization when civil society actors decide to cooperate with local governments to extend immigrant rights. We also underline the potential representational gap that emerges when those who are directly implicated, namely undocumented migrants, are not actively involved in campaigns that aim to improve their inclusion.