What do cities which have lost their economic, political, and cultural power and population reveal about the location of migrants in city-making and urban politics? What do they disclose about the fault lines of neoliberal urban redevelopment? Empirical findings from left-behind cities might provide new insights to think about migrants, urban politics, and current populist narratives. However, this requires a move beyond the historically and culturally constructed categories and divides of migration scholarship and public debates. Once we shift our focus to the entanglements between urban regeneration and their dispossessive forces that create common conditions of displacement and precarity for urban residents, we might see new ways of exploring solidarities for social and historical justice struggles in these cities.
Ayse Caglar is a Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vienna University and a Permanent Fellow at IWM. She is a member of Academia Europaea and the Science Academy Society of Turkey. Before joining University of Vienna she was a professor and the chair of Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University, Budapest and was a Minerva Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen. She has held visiting professorships in several universities including Stockholm University, IHS Vienna, Central European University, Budapest, Donauuniversität Krems, and Ethnologisches Seminar Zürich and was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (IUE), Florence.
She has widely published on processes of migration, urban restructuring, transnationalization and the state, and of disposession and displacement. Her most recent comparative empirical research addressed the location of migrants in city-making processes especially in disempowered cities.
