Making Sanctuary Cities: Migration, citizenship and urban governance
Dr Rachel Humphris explains how citizenship is negotiated and contested in sanctuary cities – sharing examples from her fieldwork in San Francisco, Sheffield and Toronto.

From its development in the 1980s, the sanctuary city movement – municipal protection of people with uncertain migration status from national immigration enforcement – has been a powerful and controversial side of progressive migration policy reform.
While some migration activists view sanctuary city policy as the most important aspect of their work, others see it as actively impairing efforts in the fight for migrant rights. In Making Sanctuary Cities, Rachel Humphris provides a new understanding of how citizenship is negotiated and contested in sanctuary cities and what political potentials are opened (and closed) by this designation.
Through fieldwork across the sanctuary cities of San Francisco, Sheffield, and Toronto – three of the first municipalities to adopt this designation in their respective countries – Humphris investigates the complexity of sanctuary city policy.
By capturing the wide-ranging meanings and practices of sanctuary in comparative context, Humphris uncovers how liberal citizenship is undermined by the very thing that makes it worth investing in – the promise of equality.
Attending to the tensions inherent in sanctuary policy, this presentation opens vital questions about the ways governing systems can extinguish political ideals, and how communities choose to live and organize to fight for a better world.
This event will be particularly useful for those interested in migration, sanctuary, activism, ethnography.
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Teamjackson via Adobe Stock.
Dr Rachel Humphris
Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Politics
Queen Mary University
Dr Rachel Humphris is a political sociologist whose research and teaching focuses on migration and citizenship, governance and policy-making, gender and race. She is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Politics at Queen Mary University of London and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Migration.
Further information
Ticketing
Open
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes