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IdentitiesGlobal Studies in Culture and Power

ISSN: 1070-289X (Print) 1547-3384 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gide20

Displacement, emplacement and migrantnewcomers: rethinking urban sociabilities withinmultiscalar power

Nina Glick Schiller & Ayse alar

To cite this article: Nina Glick Schiller & Ayse alar (2016) Displacement, emplacement andmigrant newcomers: rethinking urban sociabilities within multiscalar power, Identities, 23:1,17-34, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2015.1016520

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2015.1016520

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Displacement, emplacement and migrant newcomers:rethinking urban sociabilities within multiscalar power

Nina Glick Schiller and Ayse alar

(Received 19 September 2013; final version received 12 December 2014)

This article contributes to the discussion of the everyday sociabilities thatarise between migrant newcomers and local urban residents. We highlight theproximal, workplace and institutionally based social relations that newcomersand locals construct through finding domains of commonality, noting that insuch instances differences are not constituting factors for the development ofurban sociabilities. The urban sociabilities we describe emerge within thecontingencies of a disempowered city in which all residents face limitedinstitutional support and social or economic opportunities. Concepts of multi-scalar displacements and emplacements are highlighted as useful for settingaside a communitarian bias in urban and migration studies and analysingurban sociabilities in ways that situate migrants within discussions of urbansocial movements.

Keywords: emplacement; cities; sociabilities; migrants; multiscalar;displacement

The terms of the argument

Building on pioneering work by Baumann (1996) and Back (1996), recentlyscholars have begun to highlight the everyday lives and urban sociabilities ofpeople of migrant background. By stressing the multiple intersecting and fluiddiversities found in everyones lives, including among people who face racialisa-tion, discrimination and differentiation, these scholars have worked to counterdominant political narratives about problematic ethnic minority cultures(Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010). Consequently, much of this research has beenconducted and analysed through the lens of diversity (Berg and Sigona 2013) orliving-with-difference (Nowicka and Vertovec 2014). However, even those inmigration studies who strive to look beyond ethnic and religious difference findthemselves referring to people of migrant background as belonging to distinctiveethno-religious communities with unique trajectories (Vertovec 2007, 1025).Hence, discussions of sociability become framed in terms of the need to bridgecommunal difference in everyday life in order to form what Paul Gilroy (2004)calls multiculture and Ralph Grillo (2005) sees as mixity (see also Wise andVelayutham 2009).

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2016Vol. 23, No. 1, 1734, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2015.1016520

2015 Taylor & Francis

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In keeping with the theme of this special issue, Seeing Place and Power, thisarticle examines what remains unseen when researchers begin with the assump-tion that although sociabilities can be built across difference ethno-religiousdifferences always remain central in interactions that involve people of migrantbackground. Specifically we suggest that in order to understand the full range ofurban sociabilities we need to be able to understand how, where, why and withinwhat structural contingencies some residents build social relations in which,whatever their differences, they are brought together by common domains ofaffect (Turner 1987), mutual respect and shared aspirations. To find a way tospeak about the mutualities that underlie such sociabilities beyond the idioms ofcommunity, we use the term domains of commonality. Our specific interest inthis article is to explain the emergence within a disempowered city of domains ofcommonality between migrant newcomers and people seen as local. We arguethat a multiscalar analysis of the differential positioning of cities and theirresidents within globe-spanning networks of unequal economic, political andcultural power can facilitate the exploration of the contingencies within whichurban sociabilities built around domains of commonality emerge in a specificcity. Such concepts and analysis bring together processes generally kept analyti-cally separate: urban restructuring, capital accumulation, migrant settlement,social and urban sociabilities and the emergence of domains of commonalityincluding positive affect.

Urban theories of social relations: continuities and problematics

The question of living with difference has, of course, pervaded Western theoriesand imaginaries of the city beginning with the work of Tnnies ([1877] 1957)and Simmel ([1903] 2002). Initially, the tendency of theorists to view urbanvistas as a land of strangers posited that city dwellers formed utilitarian socialties devoid of the overlapping unities of kinship, neighbouring and culture thatknit together rural communities. Although generations of urban researcherschallenged the binary contrasts between rural and urban life, the primacy ofdifference still haunts contemporary theorists of urban social relations, even thosewho seek a habit of seeing the strange as familiar and the city as a space for themany (Amin 2012, 8). Ash Amin (2012, 5), for example, sees cities as inhabitedby strangers who only meet in encounters framed by a slew of personal andcollective labelling conventions inherited, learnt, absorbed and practiced. Hecalls for the study of social relations within urban spaces but assumes thatembodied differences including divisions of ethnicity and race necessarily pre-figure the nature of urban social relations, although these divisions can be over-come by social interventions within a politics of the commons.

Scholars of migrant settlement, responding methodologically to critiques ofthe ethnic lens (Glick Schiller, alar, and Guldbrandsen 2006), also haveturned to the study of urban social relations and their diversities in urban spaces(Nowicka and Vertovec 2014; Fox and Jones 2013). This spatial turn signals a

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belated realisation by migration scholars that geography matters fundamentallyand that attention must be paid to different conditions, different scales andurban spaces (Berg and Sigona 2013, 352). Yet, without a global and relationalperspective on the structural shaping of these conditions and spaces, mostethnographers of urban sociabilities choose to conduct neighbourhood studiesand approach them as self-constituting places (Arapoglou 2012; Phillips 2005).Neighbourhoods are imagined as places of everyday life where women andmen live, work, consume, relate to others, forge identities, cope with or challengeroutine, habit and established codes of conduct (Vaiou and Lykogianni 2006, 731).

We suggest that researchers of migrant everyday life must not only distin-guish between sociality and sociability but also go beyond a general invocationof space to develop analyses of the multiscalar trajectories within which urbanplaces and cities are made (Massey 2005). Sociality denotes the entire fieldwithin which individuals are embedded in a matrix of relationships with others(Strathern 1996, 66). Much of what is described as living with difference,encompassing relationships of commonplace diversity and the ethos of mixing(Wessendorf 2013), as well as conflicts and hostilities made visible in terms ofdifference (Rogaly and Qureshi 2013), are best understood as sociality. In con-trast, as Simmel noted, sociability consists of relations in which one acts asthough all were equal, as though he esteemed everyone, exactly because theseinteractions are not about difference (Simmel [1910] 1949, 257). For Simmel, thestringent demands of real life ([1910] 1949, 255) limit this form of socialrelationship. However, beginning with the path-breaking work by Lofland (1973),urban researchers have demonstrated that urbanites frequently turn casual informalmeetings into ongoing affective relationships that link them to urban spaces (Pink2012). Hence, sociabilities may include relationships of social support providinghelp, protection, resources and further social connections; however, they aredistinctive from other social relations because the pleasure, satisfaction and meaningthey engender emerge from actors mutual sense of being human. Our respondentsused the term human to refer to the domains of commonality that emerged fromsome of their interactions.1 Such interactions can be fleeting or persist and developover time (Lofland 1973).

Researchers can visualise where, when, how and why such urban sociabilitiesarise a central concern of this article through a multiscalar analysis. Here wediscard a nested concept of scale as encompassing a distinct hierarchy of admin-istrative units such as neighbourhood, city, province, nation state and interna-tional organisations. Instead, we build on those geographers (Brenner 2010;Marston 2000) who see scales as relational, socially constructed and constitutedby various intersecting trajectories of institutionalised networks of power. Cities,understood not as bounded units of analysis but as entry points, can be useful inconstructing a multiscalar analysis (alar and Glick Schiller 2011; GlickSchiller 2012). Unlike neighbourhoods, cities generally have their own govern-ance regimes, economic and spatial development plans and powers, and localversions of globally circulating regeneration narratives, and are players in

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emerging publicprivate forms of neighbourhood or district management. Theyare enmeshed in the processes of the accumulation and destruction of capitalwithin globe-spanning networks of economic, political and cultural power(Harvey 2006). However, cities are differentially positioned within these net-works and city leaderships actively seek to maintain or improve their positioningthrough competition with other cities (Bodnr 2001; Brenner, Marcuse, andMayer 2009). Cities differ in the institutional and opportunity structures theyprovide to all their residents, whether or not they are categorised as migrants(Syrett and Sepulveda 2012). Neighbourhood dynamics are shaped within theseinstitutional structures. All residents must build their social relations within theircitys political and economic restructuring and its concomitant narratives aboutthe city and its residents (Smith 2002). The relationships of urban residents toeach other are shaped by these processes, which in turn contribute to therestructuring of each city and the construction of its narratives.

To address what kind of urban sociabilities emerge in particular citiesbetween people who are categorised as native or local to the city and newlyarrived migrants, we suggest that the unit of study becomes the social relationsformed by people as they encounter each other. These encounters occur withinthe social spaces of residence, work or institutional activity, all constituted withinthe intersecting multiscalar networks of power. In the exploration of urbansociabilities in this article, we examine how those characterised as migrants andlocals form such sociabilities in the disempowered city of Manchester, NewHampshire (NH), in the northeastern United States.

We use the term migrant not to continue a process of categorising andassuming cultural or religious difference, but to counter the assumptions ofmany public policymakers and national politicians that both migrant newcomersand communities of citizens of migrant background stand outside of the socialsystem, constitute a threat to social cohesion and require integration (alar2013). The article argues that when assumptions of categorical communal differ-ence are set aside researchers are better able to document the ways in whichmigrant newcomers become part of the social relations and institutional frame-works that constitute the local social relations of a particular place. In point offact, migrant is a fluid signifier since it can apply to persons who move withinas well as across international boundaries, and who can have varying legalstatuses, from the unauthorised to citizens. However, in this article, migrantsrefers to those who crossed international borders, encompassing those who variedin their legal statuses: unauthorised, refugee, legal resident or citizen. With rareexceptions, even those newcomers with professional backgrounds and legalauthorisation to work found only low-wage entry-level employment inManchester. Our ethnography revealed that from 2000 to 2007, the time of thisresearch, migrant newcomers of various legal statuses in Manchester, includingthe unauthorised, were able to build urban sociabilities in similar ways.2

To fully enable an analysis of the contingencies within which our respondentsformed sociabilities in Manchester, two further terms prove useful: displacement


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and emplacement. Displacement is currently being experienced by large numbersof people, whether or not they have physically moved to another residence, cityor country (Kalb 2013). Displacement includes not only a range of mobilitiesincluding border-crossing migration but also the increasing precarity of thoseconsidered locals who experience various forms of dispossession: unemploy-ment, part-time employment, early involuntary retirement, lower wage rates,forced relocation, loss of social status, mortgage foreclosure and downward socialmobility (Morell, 2014). Emplacement can usefully be defined as the socialprocesses through which a dispossessed individual builds or rebuilds networksof connection within the constraints and opportunities of a specific city (GlickSchiller and alar 2013; Glick Schiller 2014). Building on theorists of spacesuch as Smith (2002), Massey (2005) and Harvey (2006), we see emplacementas a processual concept that links together space, place and power. Thesociabilities we describe in this article are sociabilities of emplacement becausethey bring together migrant newcomers and local people who together buildaspects of their social belonging to the city. We emphasise that the people weidentify as local were themselves experiencing multiple forms of social disloca-tion and precarity in relationship to the restructuring of Manchester and themultiple trajectories of uneven power within which the city and its residentswere positioned.

Processes of emplacement and displacement intersect with the continuingrestructuring of a city within locally based but often globally extending networksof multiscalar power. Hence, emplacement must be understood within an analysisof broader processes of the displacement that result from the multiple forms ofdispossession that accompany the production and destruction of capital. Whilecircuits of capital are currently global, and forms of accumulation flexible, at thesame time processes of accumulation through dispossession take place withinspecific places at specific times (Harvey 2004).

Manchester, USA: the ambience of welcome within urban disempowering

To illustrate our arguments and explore emplacement sociabilities, we draw fromextensive participant observation, interviews conducted in Manchester, as well asan analysis of city planning documents and websites. Between 2001 and 2007, inthe course of three different research projects, members of our research teamsinterviewed 48 migrants many of them newly arrived from Latin America, theMiddle East, Africa, Asia and Europe as well as 29 local officials, serviceproviders and religious leaders (Glick Schiller, alar, and Guldbrandsen 2006;Glick Schiller et al. 2009). Our team deployed multiple entry points to identifyrespondents including the networks radiating from two refugee resettlementagencies, social housing, Catholic and Protestant churches, universities andbusinesses.

Applying a multiscalar analysis, we consider Manchester, NH, a relativelydisempowered city, in the sense that the city could exert little power within its


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economic, political, religious and cultural networks that spanned NewHampshire, New England, the United States and the globe. The positionality ofthe city affected the opportunities, aspirations and the ways in which the citysresidents, including newcomers with migrant backgrounds, constructed socialrelations and sought to forge sociabilities. As a textile producer within a globalchain of commodity production and flows of local and international labour,Manchester had been an economically and prosperous city in the nineteenthand early twentieth centuries. However, by the 1960s, the greater Manchesterarea had lost most of its industrial base. During the period of our study, 109,000people resided within the citys boundaries (City of Manchester 2006).

In the 1990s, the city, and its surrounding region, experienced a brief man-ufacturing effervescence as a result of the growth of hi-tech, defence and knowl-edge industries in the greater Boston area and the incorporation of theManchester area into complicated, flexible supply chains fuelled by foreigninvestment (Gittell 2000). As a result, the rate of unemployment during thestudy was relatively low, dropping to 3.7% in 2004 (US Department of Labor2012). However, even in this short period of economic resurgence, employerscame and went rapidly, jobs were insecure and health and safety regulations werenot enforced. Consequently, workers experienced the low unemployment within acontinuing sense of precarity.

After the US dot-com hi-tech bubble burst in 2000 and the shock waves of11 September 2001 reverberated through the US economy and global economy,increasing numbers of manufacturing sites in the Manchester area reduced theirworkforce or closed. Manchester city leaders responded by increasingly adoptingthe globe-circulating narratives of urban regeneration through investment incultural and recreation industries and rebranding. They focused on a rebuilt citycentre, with a diverse urban ambience (Woods and Landry 2008; Florida 2003).Scarce public resources were channelled into neo-liberal publicprivate regenera-tion projects, while the city reduced funding for public services and the fewprogrammes offered to migrants.

The short-term surge in manufacturing in the 1990s accounted for the pre-sence of new migrants in Manchester of varying legal statuses. Newcomers,without knowledge of English or authorisation to work, found employment.The US Office of Refugee Resettlement responded to this opportunity structureby settling people with official refugee status in Manchester and increasing thesenumbers in the first years of the twenty-first century. The city was allocated adiverse and ever-changing mix of refugees. At the same time, energetic interna-tional recruiting by a local private university brought a scattering of students fromthe Middle East, South Asia and Africa who settled in the city after their studies.In short, the 8% of the population (City of Manchester 2010) born outside of theUnited States included people with diverse legal statuses, class backgrounds andsocial statuses.

Until the financial and subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, city leadersincluding the mayor and aldermen generally spoke positively of the new


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migrants, whom they pictured as strengthening the citys low-wage andcompliant industrial workforce. An alderman noted Without immigrants alot of business wouldnt be here. Manchesters Welfare Director spoke in asimilar vein, arguing that: The city is fortunate to have them. The groupscoming in have a good work ethic. When, after 2001, federal immigrationauthorities conducted raids and surveillance, the city officials did not endorsesuch actions. During the 7 years of our research, people of migrant back-ground generally did not feel threatened by the city policies or targeted bynarratives of exclusion.

When the city leadership turned to a strategy of urban regeneration to re-empower and position their city, the citys public narrative remained generallymigrant-friendly. However, in extending their welcome, city leaders said nothingabout the unsafe working conditions and inadequate and expensive housing thatconfronted newcomers. There were few charitable organisations or health orsocial services and the city lacked the informal supports of co-ethnic neighbour-hoods. Migration researchers in North America and Europe often assume thepresence of such institutional supports. However, funding streams for socialservices including migrant-based organisations are differentially distributedacross different cities and geographic regions.

Manchester, as is the case with relatively disempowered cities, had fewmigrant associations and most were short-lived, in part because they obtainedlittle or no support from public or non-government sources. Generally,migrants only found services from a handful of programmes that providedsupport for the poor, ill, disabled or homeless and the number of theseprogrammes was reduced over the years. Federally funded agencies provideda limited number of services for newly arrived refugees during their firstmonths of settlement.

Given the diversity, relative small size of the migrant population and lack ofneighbourhood-based services, Manchester did not develop concentrated residen-tial clusters of migrants who shared an ethnic or national background. In fact,distinctive neighbourhood cultures were not part of the contemporary ethos of thecity, although there were remnants of a French-Canadian clustering from the firsthalf of the twentieth century. Manchester did have areas associated with richerand poorer residents and areas that can be considered multiethnic with migrantsfrom diverse countries, but people of migrant background lived throughoutthe city.

How was it possible for some migrants to form sociabilities of emplace-ment in Manchester? In a brief article, we can only sketch the typesof emplacement sociabilities that residents formed as they confronted themultiscalar trajectories that were reshaping their city, including the readyavailability of low-wage employment, the precarity of this employment andthe citys neo-liberal restructuring processes that led residents whatevertheir background to find little institutional support and few futurepossibilities.


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Sociabilities of emplacement: proximal, workplace, institutional

In Manchester, newly arrived migrants as well as other residents generallydepended on personal networks for support in settling and claiming to be part ofthe city. Our data revealed that in order to settle in the city migrant newcomersoften forged relationships of mutual support and positive affect with people seenas local in the sense of long time city residents who are identified as native.Without well-funded institutions to assist in settlement, our respondents searchedfor individuals who might help them. In many cases, migrants took the lead toestablish forms of sociability and in doing so transformed their lives as well asthose with whom they interacted. As Leila, an Iraqi refugee, recalled:

The people are friendly. Not at first, you have to talk to them. . .. My neighbor had abad attitude toward me, but I made her cookies and now she is nice. . . . Because inmy country we take care of our neighbors. Here people work, go home, eat, drinkand dont talk to others.

These relations centred on domains of commonality rather than predefinedcategories of group relations. They were initiated in three different types ofsettings.

Proximal sociabilities

Many respondents spoke of the sociability of specific neighbours, not of aneighbourhood. Through random encounters with someone who lived nearbyor within the shared proximal space of an apartment building or an apartmentcomplex, newcomers found people who proved to be supportive and sympathetic.

Kate, a refugee and single mother from Sierra Leone, was one of the manypeople whose ability to become settled in the city was linked to someone she metin her first place of residence, a three-story building with several flats on eachfloor. The building housed refugees from different countries as well as peoplewho were native to Manchester or to the region. Kate explained:

The people on the first floor were black and white and were friendly with me. Rozlived on the first floor. She is very good. She is . . . unable to walk. She helped meread and played cards. After that building was sold, she had no apartment near meand moved to Maine [the neighboring state]. But she brought her friend Karen . . .[who still comes to visit and brings her daughter]. . . . Roz still visits me and Ilike her.

Kates memories of the conflict in her homeland were often too painful for her toreadily talk about, but Roz, a local person, was initially able to empathise withKates history of traumatic displacement through her own disability and itsaccompanying social barriers. Soon after they met both were displaced bycitys regeneration processes, which led to the redevelopment of property intheir neighbourhood. Roz was not only forced from her home but also out of


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her neighbourhood, city and state. However, Roz and Kate maintained theirrelationship and through it continued to be linked to social networks inManchester.

Several respondents reported that it was on the street where they lived thatthey found people who proved to be significant in their lives. These strangers,who became companions, sometimes offered immediate help ranging from foodto a telephone calling card and survival English. Such local and serendipitousrelations often linked a newcomer to work or to local institutions without themediation of communitarian structures and narratives. It was on his street thatEmrah, who fled from what is now Bosnia, found not only informal employmentbut also someone he liked and trusted. Emrah recalled that:

the first two months I was here I got to know a black man, Dave, an American. Iwas watching him from across the street. He was mowing the lawn and . . . I said Ican help. He offered me a job working with him. This was my first job, although itwas informal. I consider this man to be like a brother. I still see him, although now Ihave moved.

In understanding this social bond, it is helpful to note that Dave, although alocal with more knowledge about how to get by within Manchesters low-wage economy, was no stranger to precarity. Manchester offered few oppor-tunities to any of its residents, with even fewer possibilities for AfricanAmericans.

Proximity did not automatically lead to sociability. Migrants who saw them-selves superior in class to those among whom they lived might keep theirdistance from their neighbours, whether or not they were ethnically similar.Boris, a Bosnian refugee, explained that he avoided neighbours in the poorersection of the city to which he and his family had recently moved because theydid not lead respectable lives. . . When we lived in a good part of the city,neighbours were talking and . . .visiting, it was good. Some Vietnamese, butmostly Americans we were visiting.

Moreover, proximity sometimes precipitated hostility. In the same building inwhich Kate made her first friend in Manchester, she also encountered hostility.On the second floor one white woman . . .turned her back on me whenever Ipassed. Kate challenged her saying, Did I do something bad to you, you dontsay hi? The woman answered, Maybe I dont want you here. However, as didother respondents who described instances of threats or conflict, Kate emphasisedthat this incident did not characterise her reception in Manchester. Instead, shesaid: I like Manchester. . . My children and I are getting help and I meet nicepeople. Our respondents generally positive view was supported by city statis-tics, which recorded only one violent incident in 2008 and three in 2009.Although such measures are not an adequate measure of racial and religiousslurs and other forms of discrimination or attack, Manchester had a very low


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incidence of hate crimes compared to other multiculturally dense communitiesnationally (City of Manchester Health Department 2011).

Workplace sociabilities

Newcomers also forged sociabilities in their workplaces. The citys workplaceswere relatively small and tended to be organised and managed through paterna-listic relationships between workers and managers or owners. Hiring was oftendone through the personal networks of managers and workers, and more experi-enced workers were expected to informally train newcomers.

Given the fact that the city did not contain concentrations of people whoshared a common ethnicity, and that most workplaces had relatively few employ-ees, migrants relied on co-workers with whom they did not share a culturalbackground, or often even a language, to help them retain their jobs. Armando,who was educated as an architect in Colombia and had to master assembly lineand kitchen skills as an unauthorised worker in Manchester, explained the needfor assistance and the significance of workplace sociabilities. From the moment Ibegin at the factory, I start to be a dependent person. . . .What I need to do, I dontunderstand. Jose, my Puerto Rican friend, said dont worry. . . I made that[mistake] a lot of times. . .. This guy was a really remarkable friend. Thewelcome extended in these relationships often went beyond the sharing of work-place knowledge. Armando continued, So Jose says to me, hey. Are youhungry?. . . Take my food! Enjoy! And I say, but its not my food, you aresupposed to eat it. He says, you dont know my wife. Shes doing a lot of foodfor me, and dont you see how fat I am? . . .So please eat it. That continued foralmost 18 months, the same situation! When I saw him, probably 2 or 3 monthsago. . . he remembered.

In the case of Armando and Jose, their common knowledge of Spanishwas helpful, as was their mutual understanding that, although Armando wasan unauthorised newcomer and Jose was a native-born citizen, they shared theinsecurities that came with racialisation as Hispanic. But, in many accounts,sociabilities emerged between individuals who shared neither language, racia-lisation nor gender. While a commonality of practice brought people together,our respondents descriptions of their workplace were not of a community ofpractice (Amin 2012, 39). Rather, they described the emergence of significantaffective and supportive dyadic interpersonal relationships, often forged withinprecarious employment situations. For example, the refugee resettlementagency required Emrah, the refugee who first found work through someonehe met on the street where he lived, to work in a local electronics factoryowned by a multinational conglomerate although he had had not time to learnEnglish. He worked alongside people from Vietnam, Puerto Rico, Mexico,Ukraine, Russia, Romania, and Americans and could speak to none of them.However,


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from the beginning my closest friend at work is an American woman, Linda, ofabout forty-five. I have worked with her for about three years. She . . . helped mefrom when I first came by explaining things to me. When I started I spoke Bosnianand she spoke English but somehow we understood each other and she wouldexplain what the supervisor wanted.

What Linda could not explain but they both experienced was the precariousnessof earning a living through industrial work in twenty-first-century Manchester.Linda and Emrah together experienced layoffs and persistent rumours that thefactory would close.

Despite their different legal statuses, those with official refugee status such asEmrah and unauthorised workers such as Armando described the same kind ofworkplace sociabilities. In each workplace, they each found in Armandos wordsat least one great friend. Even in work situations that could seem isolating,respondents reported establishing relationships of sociability. Pierre, a college-educated refugee from Rwanda, managed to gain a US college education bysupporting himself as a caregiver for Albert, who was severely disabled. Low-waged caretakers of severely disabled people were one of the jobs available tonew migrants in Manchester. Alberts parents came to be among the people Pierrefelt closest to in Manchester. He reported that if I ever have a problem, I callthem. While the parents provided advice and support, Pierre gave Albertsparents a sense that their son was being cared for with respect, a respect thatwas evident during the interview that we conducted in the flat that Pierre sharedwith Albert. As in many of the sociabilities that our research explored, althoughthe relationship was unequal in terms of social, economic and cultural capital,both sides found sources of satisfaction. Both, also, although unequally, broughtto their interactions experiences of feeling out of place. Alberts parents open-ness to Pierre was mediated by their disabled and stigmatised sons socialpositioning.

Newcomers also forged emplacement sociabilities with mangers, profes-sionals or employers who sometimes offered them social connections thatwere life altering, for both participants in the social relationship. For example,Tuan, one of the first Vietnamese refugees to settle in Manchester, asked John,an engineer who was a white native of New Hampshire, whether he would actas a sponsor for Tuans familys application for resettlement (Glick Schiller,alar, and Guldbrandsen 2006). John and his family, impressed by Tuansdrive and commitment to the job, co-sponsored Tuans parents, several of hissiblings and their nuclear families. Over the years as Tuan obtained a collegedegree, a better job, bought a house and became a leader of the local Buddhisttemple, he included John in his extended family celebrations. Then John losthis engineering job through corporate restructuring and was unsuccessful inestablishing a small business. At a Buddhist dinner, Tuans extended familysigned a Christmas card, which included warm wishes and hundreds of dollarsfor John.


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Noting that some relationships between workers and managers or employerscould be considered emplacement sociabilities does not negate the many otherinstances when exploitation predominated in these relationships. Employers andmanagers created paternalistic relationships by employing family members oftheir workers or granting personal favours. In return they expected workers toaccept without complaint dangerous conditions, low wages and a denial of rightsand benefits. Herman, who had been a banker in the Congo and worked in atextile factory after immigrating, had the tips of two fingers sliced off by a cuttingmachine. After the accident, Irma, the companys human relations manager,seemed to offer medical and emotional support but in effect pressured Hermanto return to work without adequate medical care or compensation for his injuries.In this instance, Herman understood that Irmas apparent concern was offered inthe interests of the company, which had illegally removed the required safeguardsfrom the machinery. Newcomers did not interpret all offers of assistance theyencountered as sociability. They differentiated between encounters of subordinat-ing difference and those in which the social relationship expressed mutualrespect.

Sociabilities initiated in institutional spaces

With the exception of born-again Christian churches, newcomers in resource-poor Manchester tended not to form ties to those institutions or organisations that,in other, more powerful, cities, habitually provide formal support and services(Glick Schiller and alar 2008, 2011). However, they did use an array ofinstitutional spaces including a resettlement agency, a multiservice centre,churches, schools, a library and a public housing agency to form informalinterpersonal connections. Some of the local people that respondents met ininstitutional spaces were volunteers; others were staff and clients. Althoughbegun in these institutions, these relationships sometimes extended far beyondthe constraints and limitations of professional obligations or an institutionsmission statement. Researchers need to distinguish between institutionallyorganised processes of settlement and urban places in which individuals initiateemplacement sociabilities.

For example, Leila, an Iraqi refugee, developed a friendship with Fran at ahousing authority office where Fran, who considered herself to be a native of thecity, worked. Fran not only assisted Leila in obtaining access to the very limitedamount of public housing in Manchester but also provided her with emotionalsupport, networks to other institutions and ongoing friendship, none of whichwas in her job description. Fran brought to the relationship her own sense of theinadequacy of her home city to provide opportunities for her skills, broader socialand political horizons, as well as her aspirations for social justice.

Armando, the unauthorised worker from Colombia, walked into a publiclibrary looking for support and met Tom. Again we quote Armando because hegenerously provided a follow-up interview that provided further insight into the


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affect and the mutuality that arose in these relationships. However, his descriptionof his relationship to Tom resonated with briefer accounts provided by manyother respondents and with the sociabilities that our research team observed andrepeatedly experienced. Tom was a middle-level manager who, because ofcorporate restructuring, found himself forced to retire early and with othersimilarly displaced local people found solace in the public library.

Armando explained how he met Tom:

One day I requested help and the librarian told me that the person sitting over thereis looking . . . for a person who needs help. And I presented myself and Tom and Istart to be really, really friends. He was protecting me, teaching me, showing me thenew life of the US. . . .. So, he was one of the important points in my life in the US.He sometimes calls me, hey, what you are doing now? . . . I received a beautifuland unique bottle of wine and I want to enjoy one glass with you. We are friendsnow for, say, almost 12 years.

Even the born-again churches might provide spaces for the initiation of socialrelations that connected a newcomer and respondent without reference to themission and activities of the church. Herman, the former banker who suffered anindustrial action and who was a devout Catholic, met a Protestant born-againwhite pastor of working-class background in the pastors church, and thenmaintained and built the relationship outside of religious spaces and despitereligious differences.

Analytical conclusions: conceptualising emplacement sociabilities

In proposing the study of sociabilities of emplacement, we want to emphasise thatit is always necessary to keep in focus, as Amin (2012) notes, the construction,imposition and naturalisation of categories of racial, ethnic and religious differ-ence, and their use in legitimating exclusion, criminalisation and hyper-exploita-tion. These categories were certainly present in Manchester, and newcomers werewell aware of their use in justifying or excusing the low wages and dangerousworking conditions, high rents and poor housing they confronted. They alsofaced interpersonal discrimination; Kate was only one of the many respondentswho described instances of racism that they experienced in Manchester.

Yet, to focus primarily on lines of difference reduces all social relations towhat Amin (2012, 169) calls a politics of the encounter based at best on thesuccess of organising a common endeavour. The political language becomesone of alliance and coalition rather than of forging mutual relationships ofrespect and affection. Based on our research, we argue for a re-examination ofthe question of sociabilities, their temporalities and their political potential. Asour ethnography demonstrates, sociabilities often develop in situations in whichthose who come together have unequal access to resources including informa-tion, skills and institutional networks. Yet social bonds, social cohesion so tospeak, emerges from a perhaps limited but potent shared set of experiences,


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emotions and aspirations including a desire for human relationships. While theymay come to the relationship with different sets of experiences and socialpossibilities, these relationships cannot be reduced to, explained by or cate-gorised by these differences including those of culture but rather understood asthe creation of partial but significant domains of human commonality includingmutual aspirations.

Through his concept of conviviality, Paul Gilroy (2004) highlights the pos-sibilities of openness in urban settings but his interest is often on the fusion ofcultures rather than sociabilities, with their shared emotions and aspirations thatmay emerge in these social engagements. Ghassan Hage (2014, 236), focusing onthe social, has called for an examination a space of commonality, whichcharacterises any desirable intersubjective relation. We do it all the time withpeople we care about despite being differently positioned in hierarchical struc-tures. It is through an emphasis on social relationships rather than culturaldifferences that we can acknowledge the possibilities and circumstances withinwhich commonalities emerge. Newcomers in Manchester and the local peoplethey befriended may have been brought together because they had differentdegrees and kinds of knowledge, social positioning and skills but the socialrelationships they forged cannot be understood through concepts of alterity,strangeness and tolerance for the other.

Much more research is needed along the parameters outlined in this articlebefore it is possible to ascertain the broader utility of the concept of sociabilitiesof emplacement. This requires comparative research that examines emplacementsociabilities within cities of different relative and relational positioning withinmultiscalar hierarchies of power (see articles this issue, also alar and GlickSchiller 2011; Glick Schiller 2012; Schmoll and Semi 2013). This is necessary inorder to understand the relationships between a citys multiscalar positioning andvariations in emplacement sociabilities as they emerge and within varying set-tings including the proximal, worksite and institutional settings explored in thisarticle.

We cannot ascertain from our Manchester research whether the lack ofinstitutional support in disempowered cities and the desperate circumstancesthat newcomers faced in Manchester leads to the sociabilities we described. Itis possible that emplacement sociabilities are more visible in disempowered citiesthan in more resource-rich cities where most research on migrant pathways ofsettlement has been conducted. Certainly we are not advocating a public policythat abandons newcomers based on the fact that some individual migrants inManchester were able to settle through sociabilities that emerged in the absenceof targeted institutional support for migrant newcomers.

We want to end by noting that such sociabilities may prove key buildingblocks of the social movements that challenge the growing class disparities thatincreasingly mark urban life. Although this argument cannot be developed withinthis article, we do think this research provides insights into how sociabilities ofthe displaced actually emerge. These sociabilities might be key to understanding


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how people are able to form fluid constellations of urban social movements toclaim economic and social justice (Mayer and Boudreau 2012).

Within the domains of commonality that people regarded as local or native toManchester constructed together with migrant newcomers, the locally displacedbegan to act and became concerned with injustice at home as well as abroad. It isperhaps from the sociabilities, established by people who, despite their differ-ences, construct domains of being human together, that the performed precarityof dispossession is transformed into struggles against the growing disparities anddisplacements of global capitalism (Butler and Athanasiou 2014; Susser 2012).

AcknowledgementWe are grateful to Burt Feintuch and Gunther Schlee for their support of this research.Researchers included Dr. T. Guldbrandsen, P. Buchannan, H. and H. Simwerayi, F.Alhassun, M. Messenger and G. Boggs. We also thank our many respondents, whobecause of confidentiality agreements have been given pseudonyms.

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

FundingWe would like to thank the following funders for their generous support: the John D. andCatherine T. MacArthur Foundation (Program on Global Security and HumanSustainability), the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, The James H. Hayesand Claire Short Hayes Professor of the Humanities, University of New Hampshire, andthe Presidents Excellence Award, University of New Hampshire Professor, Department ofAnthropology.

Notes1. Openness to commonality rather than to difference can be called situated cosmopo-

litanism, a topic explored elsewhere (Glick Schiller 2014; Glick Schiller, Darieva, andGruner-Domic 2011, see also Frykman 2015; Nashashibi 2007). Although somerespondents used the term friendship, not all used this term to encompass therange of sociabilities combining mutual support and positive affect.

2. This may well have changed. The global financial crisis of 2008, rising unemploy-ment, the subprime mortgage crisis that further displaced many city residents, includ-ing migrants, have made Manchester less welcoming to refugees. The Obamaadministration mass deportations affect the daily sociabilities and trust possible byboth authorised and unauthorised migrants.

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NINA GLICK SCHILLER is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology atUniversity of Manchester and Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for SocialAnthropology.ADDRESS: Advokatenweg 36, 06114 Halle (Saale), GermanyEmail: [email protected]

AYSE ALAR is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vienna.ADDRESS: Althanstrae 14, 1090 Vienna, AustriaEmail: [email protected]


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AbstractThe terms of the argumentUrban theories of social relations: continuities and problematicsManchester, USA: the ambience of welcome within urban disempoweringSociabilities of emplacement: proximal, workplace, institutionalProximal sociabilitiesWorkplace sociabilitiesSociabilities initiated in institutional spaces

Analytical conclusions: conceptualising emplacement sociabilitiesAcknowledgementDisclosure statementFundingNotesReferences

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