Making Sanctuary Cities: Migration, citizenship and urban governance
Join this event to hear Dr Rachel Humphris explain how citizenship is negotiated in sanctuary cities.
Making Sanctuary Cities: Migration, citizenship and urban governance
16 Oct 2025, 12:00 – 13:00
Since its emergence in the 1980s, the sanctuary city movement – municipal protection of people with uncertain migration status from national immigration enforcement – has been both powerful and controversial within progressive migration reform. Some activists view sanctuary policy as central to their work, while others see it as hindering broader struggles for migrant rights.
In Making Sanctuary Cities, Rachel Humphris offers a new understanding of how citizenship is negotiated in these spaces and what political possibilities the designation enables or constrains. Drawing on fieldwork in San Francisco, Sheffield, and Toronto – among the first cities in their countries to adopt sanctuary status – Humphris explores the complexity of these policies.
By tracing the varied meanings and practices of sanctuary across contexts, she shows how liberal citizenship is destabilised by the very ideal that sustains it: equality. Attending to these tensions, her book raises vital questions about how governing systems can erode political ideals, and how communities resist to imagine and build more just futures.
This event will be particularly useful to researchers, policy makers, teachers, and students.
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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.
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