Identities

Global Studies in Culture and Power

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

Displacement, emplacement and migrant

newcomers: rethinking urban sociabilities within
multiscalar power
Nina Glick Schiller & Ayse alar
To cite this article: Nina Glick Schiller & Ayse alar (2016) Displacement, emplacement and
migrant 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

Published online: 17 Mar 2015.

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Date: 12 November 2015, At: 10:25

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2016

Vol. 23, No. 1, 1734, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2015.1016520

Displacement, emplacement and migrant newcomers:

rethinking urban sociabilities within multiscalar power
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 10:25 12 November 2015

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 that
arise between migrant newcomers and local urban residents. We highlight the
proximal, workplace and institutionally based social relations that newcomers
and locals construct through finding domains of commonality, noting that in
such instances differences are not constituting factors for the development of
urban sociabilities. The urban sociabilities we describe emerge within the
contingencies of a disempowered city in which all residents face limited
institutional support and social or economic opportunities. Concepts of multiscalar displacements and emplacements are highlighted as useful for setting
aside a communitarian bias in urban and migration studies and analysing
urban sociabilities in ways that situate migrants within discussions of urban
social movements.
Keywords: emplacement;
displacement

cities; sociabilities;

migrants; multiscalar;

The terms of the argument

Building on pioneering work by Baumann (1996) and Back (1996), recently
scholars have begun to highlight the everyday lives and urban sociabilities of
people of migrant background. By stressing the multiple intersecting and fluid
diversities found in everyones lives, including among people who face racialisation, discrimination and differentiation, these scholars have worked to counter
dominant political narratives about problematic ethnic minority cultures
(Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010). Consequently, much of this research has been
conducted and analysed through the lens of diversity (Berg and Sigona 2013) or
living-with-difference (Nowicka and Vertovec 2014). However, even those in
migration studies who strive to look beyond ethnic and religious difference find
themselves referring to people of migrant background as belonging to distinctive
ethno-religious communities with unique trajectories (Vertovec 2007, 1025).
Hence, discussions of sociability become framed in terms of the need to bridge
communal difference in everyday life in order to form what Paul Gilroy (2004)
calls multiculture and Ralph Grillo (2005) sees as mixity (see also Wise and
Velayutham 2009).

2015 Taylor & Francis

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N. Glick Schiller and A. alar

In keeping with the theme of this special issue, Seeing Place and Power, this
article examines what remains unseen when researchers begin with the assumption that although sociabilities can be built across difference ethno-religious
differences always remain central in interactions that involve people of migrant
background. Specifically we suggest that in order to understand the full range of
urban sociabilities we need to be able to understand how, where, why and within
what structural contingencies some residents build social relations in which,
whatever their differences, they are brought together by common domains of
affect (Turner 1987), mutual respect and shared aspirations. To find a way to
speak about the mutualities that underlie such sociabilities beyond the idioms of
community, we use the term domains of commonality. Our specific interest in
this article is to explain the emergence within a disempowered city of domains of
commonality between migrant newcomers and people seen as local. We argue
that a multiscalar analysis of the differential positioning of cities and their
residents within globe-spanning networks of unequal economic, political and
cultural power can facilitate the exploration of the contingencies within which
urban sociabilities built around domains of commonality emerge in a specific
city. Such concepts and analysis bring together processes generally kept analytically separate: urban restructuring, capital accumulation, migrant settlement,
social and urban sociabilities and the emergence of domains of commonality
including positive affect.
Urban theories of social relations: continuities and problematics
The question of living with difference has, of course, pervaded Western theories
and imaginaries of the city beginning with the work of Tnnies ([1877] 1957)
and Simmel ([1903] 2002). Initially, the tendency of theorists to view urban
vistas as a land of strangers posited that city dwellers formed utilitarian social
ties devoid of the overlapping unities of kinship, neighbouring and culture that
knit together rural communities. Although generations of urban researchers
challenged the binary contrasts between rural and urban life, the primacy of
difference still haunts contemporary theorists of urban social relations, even those
who seek a habit of seeing the strange as familiar and the city as a space for the
many (Amin 2012, 8). Ash Amin (2012, 5), for example, sees cities as inhabited
by strangers who only meet in encounters framed by a slew of personal and
collective labelling conventions inherited, learnt, absorbed and practiced. He
calls for the study of social relations within urban spaces but assumes that
embodied differences including divisions of ethnicity and race necessarily prefigure the nature of urban social relations, although these divisions can be overcome by social interventions within a politics of the commons.
Scholars of migrant settlement, responding methodologically to critiques of
the ethnic lens (Glick Schiller, alar, and Guldbrandsen 2006), also have
turned 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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19

belated realisation by migration scholars that geography matters fundamentally

and that attention must be paid to different conditions, different scales and
urban spaces (Berg and Sigona 2013, 352). Yet, without a global and relational
perspective on the structural shaping of these conditions and spaces, most
ethnographers of urban sociabilities choose to conduct neighbourhood studies
and approach them as self-constituting places (Arapoglou 2012; Phillips 2005).
Neighbourhoods are imagined as places of everyday life where women and
men live, work, consume, relate to others, forge identities, cope with or challenge
routine, habit and established codes of conduct (Vaiou and Lykogianni 2006, 731).
We suggest that researchers of migrant everyday life must not only distinguish between sociality and sociability but also go beyond a general invocation
of space to develop analyses of the multiscalar trajectories within which urban
places and cities are made (Massey 2005). Sociality denotes the entire field
within 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 of
difference (Rogaly and Qureshi 2013), are best understood as sociality. In contrast, as Simmel noted, sociability consists of relations in which one acts as
though all were equal, as though he esteemed everyone, exactly because these
interactions are not about difference (Simmel [1910] 1949, 257). For Simmel, the
stringent demands of real life ([1910] 1949, 255) limit this form of social
relationship. However, beginning with the path-breaking work by Lofland (1973),
urban researchers have demonstrated that urbanites frequently turn casual informal
meetings into ongoing affective relationships that link them to urban spaces (Pink
2012). Hence, sociabilities may include relationships of social support providing
help, protection, resources and further social connections; however, they are
distinctive from other social relations because the pleasure, satisfaction and meaning
they engender emerge from actors mutual sense of being human. Our respondents
used the term human to refer to the domains of commonality that emerged from
some of their interactions.1 Such interactions can be fleeting or persist and develop
over time (Lofland 1973).
Researchers can visualise where, when, how and why such urban sociabilities
arise a central concern of this article through a multiscalar analysis. Here we
discard a nested concept of scale as encompassing a distinct hierarchy of administrative units such as neighbourhood, city, province, nation state and international organisations. Instead, we build on those geographers (Brenner 2010;
Marston 2000) who see scales as relational, socially constructed and constituted
by various intersecting trajectories of institutionalised networks of power. Cities,
understood not as bounded units of analysis but as entry points, can be useful in
constructing a multiscalar analysis (alar and Glick Schiller 2011; Glick
Schiller 2012). Unlike neighbourhoods, cities generally have their own governance regimes, economic and spatial development plans and powers, and local
versions of globally circulating regeneration narratives, and are players in

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N. Glick Schiller and A. alar

emerging publicprivate forms of neighbourhood or district management. They

are enmeshed in the processes of the accumulation and destruction of capital
within globe-spanning networks of economic, political and cultural power
(Harvey 2006). However, cities are differentially positioned within these networks and city leaderships actively seek to maintain or improve their positioning
through competition with other cities (Bodnr 2001; Brenner, Marcuse, and
Mayer 2009). Cities differ in the institutional and opportunity structures they
provide to all their residents, whether or not they are categorised as migrants
(Syrett and Sepulveda 2012). Neighbourhood dynamics are shaped within these
institutional structures. All residents must build their social relations within their
citys political and economic restructuring and its concomitant narratives about
the city and its residents (Smith 2002). The relationships of urban residents to
each other are shaped by these processes, which in turn contribute to the
restructuring of each city and the construction of its narratives.
To address what kind of urban sociabilities emerge in particular cities
between people who are categorised as native or local to the city and newly
arrived migrants, we suggest that the unit of study becomes the social relations
formed by people as they encounter each other. These encounters occur within
the social spaces of residence, work or institutional activity, all constituted within
the intersecting multiscalar networks of power. In the exploration of urban
sociabilities in this article, we examine how those characterised as migrants and
locals form such sociabilities in the disempowered city of Manchester, New
Hampshire (NH), in the northeastern United States.
We use the term migrant not to continue a process of categorising and
assuming cultural or religious difference, but to counter the assumptions of
many public policymakers and national politicians that both migrant newcomers
and communities of citizens of migrant background stand outside of the social
system, constitute a threat to social cohesion and require integration (alar
2013). The article argues that when assumptions of categorical communal difference are set aside researchers are better able to document the ways in which
migrant newcomers become part of the social relations and institutional frameworks that constitute the local social relations of a particular place. In point of
fact, migrant is a fluid signifier since it can apply to persons who move within
as well as across international boundaries, and who can have varying legal
statuses, from the unauthorised to citizens. However, in this article, migrants
refers to those who crossed international borders, encompassing those who varied
in their legal statuses: unauthorised, refugee, legal resident or citizen. With rare
exceptions, even those newcomers with professional backgrounds and legal
authorisation to work found only low-wage entry-level employment in
Manchester. Our ethnography revealed that from 2000 to 2007, the time of this
research, migrant newcomers of various legal statuses in Manchester, including
the unauthorised, were able to build urban sociabilities in similar ways.2
To fully enable an analysis of the contingencies within which our respondents
formed sociabilities in Manchester, two further terms prove useful: displacement

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21

and emplacement. Displacement is currently being experienced by large numbers

of people, whether or not they have physically moved to another residence, city
or country (Kalb 2013). Displacement includes not only a range of mobilities
including border-crossing migration but also the increasing precarity of those
considered locals who experience various forms of dispossession: unemployment, part-time employment, early involuntary retirement, lower wage rates,
forced relocation, loss of social status, mortgage foreclosure and downward social
mobility (Morell, 2014). Emplacement can usefully be defined as the social
processes through which a dispossessed individual builds or rebuilds networks
of connection within the constraints and opportunities of a specific city (Glick
Schiller and alar 2013; Glick Schiller 2014). Building on theorists of space
such as Smith (2002), Massey (2005) and Harvey (2006), we see emplacement
as a processual concept that links together space, place and power. The
sociabilities we describe in this article are sociabilities of emplacement because
they bring together migrant newcomers and local people who together build
aspects of their social belonging to the city. We emphasise that the people we
identify as local were themselves experiencing multiple forms of social dislocation and precarity in relationship to the restructuring of Manchester and the
multiple trajectories of uneven power within which the city and its residents
were positioned.
Processes of emplacement and displacement intersect with the continuing
restructuring of a city within locally based but often globally extending networks
of multiscalar power. Hence, emplacement must be understood within an analysis
of broader processes of the displacement that result from the multiple forms of
dispossession that accompany the production and destruction of capital. While
circuits of capital are currently global, and forms of accumulation flexible, at the
same time processes of accumulation through dispossession take place within
specific 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 from
extensive participant observation, interviews conducted in Manchester, as well as
an analysis of city planning documents and websites. Between 2001 and 2007, in
the course of three different research projects, members of our research teams
interviewed 48 migrants many of them newly arrived from Latin America, the
Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe as well as 29 local officials, service
providers and religious leaders (Glick Schiller, alar, and Guldbrandsen 2006;
Glick Schiller et al. 2009). Our team deployed multiple entry points to identify
respondents including the networks radiating from two refugee resettlement
agencies, social housing, Catholic and Protestant churches, universities and
businesses.
Applying a multiscalar analysis, we consider Manchester, NH, a relatively
disempowered city, in the sense that the city could exert little power within its

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N. Glick Schiller and A. alar

economic, political, religious and cultural networks that spanned New

Hampshire, New England, the United States and the globe. The positionality of
the city affected the opportunities, aspirations and the ways in which the citys
residents, including newcomers with migrant backgrounds, constructed social
relations and sought to forge sociabilities. As a textile producer within a global
chain of commodity production and flows of local and international labour,
Manchester had been an economically and prosperous city in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. However, by the 1960s, the greater Manchester
area had lost most of its industrial base. During the period of our study, 109,000
people resided within the citys boundaries (City of Manchester 2006).
In the 1990s, the city, and its surrounding region, experienced a brief manufacturing effervescence as a result of the growth of hi-tech, defence and knowledge industries in the greater Boston area and the incorporation of the
Manchester area into complicated, flexible supply chains fuelled by foreign
investment (Gittell 2000). As a result, the rate of unemployment during the
study was relatively low, dropping to 3.7% in 2004 (US Department of Labor
2012). However, even in this short period of economic resurgence, employers
came and went rapidly, jobs were insecure and health and safety regulations were
not enforced. Consequently, workers experienced the low unemployment within a
continuing sense of precarity.
After the US dot-com hi-tech bubble burst in 2000 and the shock waves of
11 September 2001 reverberated through the US economy and global economy,
increasing numbers of manufacturing sites in the Manchester area reduced their
workforce or closed. Manchester city leaders responded by increasingly adopting
the globe-circulating narratives of urban regeneration through investment in
cultural and recreation industries and rebranding. They focused on a rebuilt city
centre, with a diverse urban ambience (Woods and Landry 2008; Florida 2003).
Scarce public resources were channelled into neo-liberal publicprivate regeneration projects, while the city reduced funding for public services and the few
programmes offered to migrants.
The short-term surge in manufacturing in the 1990s accounted for the presence 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 structure
by settling people with official refugee status in Manchester and increasing these
numbers in the first years of the twenty-first century. The city was allocated a
diverse and ever-changing mix of refugees. At the same time, energetic international recruiting by a local private university brought a scattering of students from
the 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 the
United States included people with diverse legal statuses, class backgrounds and
social statuses.
Until the financial and subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, city leaders
including the mayor and aldermen generally spoke positively of the new

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23

migrants, whom they pictured as strengthening the citys low-wage and

compliant industrial workforce. An alderman noted Without immigrants a
lot of business wouldnt be here. Manchesters Welfare Director spoke in a
similar vein, arguing that: The city is fortunate to have them. The groups
coming in have a good work ethic. When, after 2001, federal immigration
authorities conducted raids and surveillance, the city officials did not endorse
such actions. During the 7 years of our research, people of migrant background generally did not feel threatened by the city policies or targeted by
narratives of exclusion.
When the city leadership turned to a strategy of urban regeneration to reempower and position their city, the citys public narrative remained generally
migrant-friendly. However, in extending their welcome, city leaders said nothing
about the unsafe working conditions and inadequate and expensive housing that
confronted newcomers. There were few charitable organisations or health or
social services and the city lacked the informal supports of co-ethnic neighbourhoods. Migration researchers in North America and Europe often assume the
presence of such institutional supports. However, funding streams for social
services including migrant-based organisations are differentially distributed
across different cities and geographic regions.
Manchester, as is the case with relatively disempowered cities, had few
migrant associations and most were short-lived, in part because they obtained
little or no support from public or non-government sources. Generally,
migrants only found services from a handful of programmes that provided
support for the poor, ill, disabled or homeless and the number of these
programmes was reduced over the years. Federally funded agencies provided
a limited number of services for newly arrived refugees during their first
months of settlement.
Given the diversity, relative small size of the migrant population and lack of
neighbourhood-based services, Manchester did not develop concentrated residential clusters of migrants who shared an ethnic or national background. In fact,
distinctive neighbourhood cultures were not part of the contemporary ethos of the
city, although there were remnants of a French-Canadian clustering from the first
half of the twentieth century. Manchester did have areas associated with richer
and poorer residents and areas that can be considered multiethnic with migrants
from diverse countries, but people of migrant background lived throughout
the city.
How was it possible for some migrants to form sociabilities of emplacement in Manchester? In a brief article, we can only sketch the types
of emplacement sociabilities that residents formed as they confronted the
multiscalar trajectories that were reshaping their city, including the ready
availability of low-wage employment, the precarity of this employment and
the citys neo-liberal restructuring processes that led residents whatever
their background to find little institutional support and few future
possibilities.

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Sociabilities of emplacement: proximal, workplace, institutional

In Manchester, newly arrived migrants as well as other residents generally
depended on personal networks for support in settling and claiming to be part of
the city. Our data revealed that in order to settle in the city migrant newcomers
often forged relationships of mutual support and positive affect with people seen
as local in the sense of long time city residents who are identified as native.
Without well-funded institutions to assist in settlement, our respondents searched
for individuals who might help them. In many cases, migrants took the lead to
establish forms of sociability and in doing so transformed their lives as well as
those 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 a
bad attitude toward me, but I made her cookies and now she is nice. . . . Because in
my country we take care of our neighbors. Here people work, go home, eat, drink
and dont talk to others.

These relations centred on domains of commonality rather than predefined

categories of group relations. They were initiated in three different types of
settings.

Proximal sociabilities
Many respondents spoke of the sociability of specific neighbours, not of a
neighbourhood. Through random encounters with someone who lived nearby
or within the shared proximal space of an apartment building or an apartment
complex, newcomers found people who proved to be supportive and sympathetic.
Kate, a refugee and single mother from Sierra Leone, was one of the many
people whose ability to become settled in the city was linked to someone she met
in her first place of residence, a three-story building with several flats on each
floor. The building housed refugees from different countries as well as people
who 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. Roz
lived on the first floor. She is very good. She is . . . unable to walk. She helped me
read and played cards. After that building was sold, she had no apartment near me
and 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 I
like her.

Kates memories of the conflict in her homeland were often too painful for her to
readily talk about, but Roz, a local person, was initially able to empathise with
Kates history of traumatic displacement through her own disability and its
accompanying social barriers. Soon after they met both were displaced by
citys regeneration processes, which led to the redevelopment of property in
their 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 their
relationship and through it continued to be linked to social networks in
Manchester.
Several respondents reported that it was on the street where they lived that
they found people who proved to be significant in their lives. These strangers,
who became companions, sometimes offered immediate help ranging from food
to a telephone calling card and survival English. Such local and serendipitous
relations often linked a newcomer to work or to local institutions without the
mediation of communitarian structures and narratives. It was on his street that
Emrah, who fled from what is now Bosnia, found not only informal employment
but 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. I
was watching him from across the street. He was mowing the lawn and . . . I said I
can help. He offered me a job working with him. This was my first job, although it
was informal. I consider this man to be like a brother. I still see him, although now I
have moved.

In understanding this social bond, it is helpful to note that Dave, although a

local with more knowledge about how to get by within Manchesters lowwage economy, was no stranger to precarity. Manchester offered few opportunities to any of its residents, with even fewer possibilities for African
Americans.
Proximity did not automatically lead to sociability. Migrants who saw themselves superior in class to those among whom they lived might keep their
distance from their neighbours, whether or not they were ethnically similar.
Boris, a Bosnian refugee, explained that he avoided neighbours in the poorer
section of the city to which he and his family had recently moved because they
did not lead respectable lives. . . When we lived in a good part of the city,
neighbours were talking and . . .visiting, it was good. Some Vietnamese, but
mostly Americans we were visiting.
Moreover, proximity sometimes precipitated hostility. In the same building in
which Kate made her first friend in Manchester, she also encountered hostility.
On the second floor one white woman . . .turned her back on me whenever I
passed. Kate challenged her saying, Did I do something bad to you, you dont
say hi? The woman answered, Maybe I dont want you here. However, as did
other respondents who described instances of threats or conflict, Kate emphasised
that this incident did not characterise her reception in Manchester. Instead, she
said: I like Manchester. . . My children and I are getting help and I meet nice
people. Our respondents generally positive view was supported by city statistics, which recorded only one violent incident in 2008 and three in 2009.
Although such measures are not an adequate measure of racial and religious
slurs and other forms of discrimination or attack, Manchester had a very low

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N. Glick Schiller and A. alar

incidence of hate crimes compared to other multiculturally dense communities

nationally (City of Manchester Health Department 2011).

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Workplace sociabilities
Newcomers also forged sociabilities in their workplaces. The citys workplaces
were relatively small and tended to be organised and managed through paternalistic relationships between workers and managers or owners. Hiring was often
done through the personal networks of managers and workers, and more experienced workers were expected to informally train newcomers.
Given the fact that the city did not contain concentrations of people who
shared a common ethnicity, and that most workplaces had relatively few employees, migrants relied on co-workers with whom they did not share a cultural
background, 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 line
and kitchen skills as an unauthorised worker in Manchester, explained the need
for assistance and the significance of workplace sociabilities. From the moment I
begin at the factory, I start to be a dependent person. . . .What I need to do, I dont
understand. Jose, my Puerto Rican friend, said dont worry. . . I made that
[mistake] a lot of times. . .. This guy was a really remarkable friend. The
welcome extended in these relationships often went beyond the sharing of workplace knowledge. Armando continued, So Jose says to me, hey. Are you
hungry?. . . Take my food! Enjoy! And I say, but its not my food, you are
supposed to eat it. He says, you dont know my wife. Shes doing a lot of food
for me, and dont you see how fat I am? . . .So please eat it. That continued for
almost 18 months, the same situation! When I saw him, probably 2 or 3 months
ago. . . he remembered.
In the case of Armando and Jose, their common knowledge of Spanish
was helpful, as was their mutual understanding that, although Armando was
an unauthorised newcomer and Jose was a native-born citizen, they shared the
insecurities that came with racialisation as Hispanic. But, in many accounts,
sociabilities emerged between individuals who shared neither language, racialisation nor gender. While a commonality of practice brought people together,
our respondents descriptions of their workplace were not of a community of
practice (Amin 2012, 39). Rather, they described the emergence of significant
affective and supportive dyadic interpersonal relationships, often forged within
precarious employment situations. For example, the refugee resettlement
agency required Emrah, the refugee who first found work through someone
he met on the street where he lived, to work in a local electronics factory
owned by a multinational conglomerate although he had had not time to learn
English. 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, of

about forty-five. I have worked with her for about three years. She . . . helped me
from when I first came by explaining things to me. When I started I spoke Bosnian
and she spoke English but somehow we understood each other and she would
explain what the supervisor wanted.

What Linda could not explain but they both experienced was the precariousness
of earning a living through industrial work in twenty-first-century Manchester.
Linda and Emrah together experienced layoffs and persistent rumours that the
factory would close.
Despite their different legal statuses, those with official refugee status such as
Emrah and unauthorised workers such as Armando described the same kind of
workplace sociabilities. In each workplace, they each found in Armandos words
at least one great friend. Even in work situations that could seem isolating,
respondents reported establishing relationships of sociability. Pierre, a collegeeducated refugee from Rwanda, managed to gain a US college education by
supporting himself as a caregiver for Albert, who was severely disabled. Lowwaged caretakers of severely disabled people were one of the jobs available to
new migrants in Manchester. Alberts parents came to be among the people Pierre
felt closest to in Manchester. He reported that if I ever have a problem, I call
them. While the parents provided advice and support, Pierre gave Alberts
parents a sense that their son was being cared for with respect, a respect that
was evident during the interview that we conducted in the flat that Pierre shared
with Albert. As in many of the sociabilities that our research explored, although
the relationship was unequal in terms of social, economic and cultural capital,
both sides found sources of satisfaction. Both, also, although unequally, brought
to their interactions experiences of feeling out of place. Alberts parents openness to Pierre was mediated by their disabled and stigmatised sons social
positioning.
Newcomers also forged emplacement sociabilities with mangers, professionals or employers who sometimes offered them social connections that
were 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 act
as a sponsor for Tuans familys application for resettlement (Glick Schiller,
alar, and Guldbrandsen 2006). John and his family, impressed by Tuans
drive and commitment to the job, co-sponsored Tuans parents, several of his
siblings and their nuclear families. Over the years as Tuan obtained a college
degree, a better job, bought a house and became a leader of the local Buddhist
temple, he included John in his extended family celebrations. Then John lost
his engineering job through corporate restructuring and was unsuccessful in
establishing a small business. At a Buddhist dinner, Tuans extended family
signed a Christmas card, which included warm wishes and hundreds of dollars
for John.

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Noting that some relationships between workers and managers or employers

could be considered emplacement sociabilities does not negate the many other
instances when exploitation predominated in these relationships. Employers and
managers created paternalistic relationships by employing family members of
their workers or granting personal favours. In return they expected workers to
accept without complaint dangerous conditions, low wages and a denial of rights
and benefits. Herman, who had been a banker in the Congo and worked in a
textile factory after immigrating, had the tips of two fingers sliced off by a cutting
machine. After the accident, Irma, the companys human relations manager,
seemed to offer medical and emotional support but in effect pressured Herman
to return to work without adequate medical care or compensation for his injuries.
In this instance, Herman understood that Irmas apparent concern was offered in
the interests of the company, which had illegally removed the required safeguards
from the machinery. Newcomers did not interpret all offers of assistance they
encountered as sociability. They differentiated between encounters of subordinating difference and those in which the social relationship expressed mutual
respect.
Sociabilities initiated in institutional spaces
With the exception of born-again Christian churches, newcomers in resourcepoor 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 of
institutional spaces including a resettlement agency, a multiservice centre,
churches, schools, a library and a public housing agency to form informal
interpersonal connections. Some of the local people that respondents met in
institutional spaces were volunteers; others were staff and clients. Although
begun in these institutions, these relationships sometimes extended far beyond
the constraints and limitations of professional obligations or an institutions
mission statement. Researchers need to distinguish between institutionally
organised processes of settlement and urban places in which individuals initiate
emplacement sociabilities.
For example, Leila, an Iraqi refugee, developed a friendship with Fran at a
housing authority office where Fran, who considered herself to be a native of the
city, worked. Fran not only assisted Leila in obtaining access to the very limited
amount of public housing in Manchester but also provided her with emotional
support, networks to other institutions and ongoing friendship, none of which
was in her job description. Fran brought to the relationship her own sense of the
inadequacy of her home city to provide opportunities for her skills, broader social
and political horizons, as well as her aspirations for social justice.
Armando, the unauthorised worker from Colombia, walked into a public
library looking for support and met Tom. Again we quote Armando because he
generously 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 description
of his relationship to Tom resonated with briefer accounts provided by many
other respondents and with the sociabilities that our research team observed and
repeatedly experienced. Tom was a middle-level manager who, because of
corporate restructuring, found himself forced to retire early and with other
similarly 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 there
is looking . . . for a person who needs help. And I presented myself and Tom and I
start to be really, really friends. He was protecting me, teaching me, showing me the
new 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 beautiful
and unique bottle of wine and I want to enjoy one glass with you. We are friends
now for, say, almost 12 years.

Even the born-again churches might provide spaces for the initiation of social
relations that connected a newcomer and respondent without reference to the
mission and activities of the church. Herman, the former banker who suffered an
industrial action and who was a devout Catholic, met a Protestant born-again
white pastor of working-class background in the pastors church, and then
maintained and built the relationship outside of religious spaces and despite
religious differences.
Analytical conclusions: conceptualising emplacement sociabilities
In proposing the study of sociabilities of emplacement, we want to emphasise that
it is always necessary to keep in focus, as Amin (2012) notes, the construction,
imposition and naturalisation of categories of racial, ethnic and religious difference, and their use in legitimating exclusion, criminalisation and hyper-exploitation. These categories were certainly present in Manchester, and newcomers were
well aware of their use in justifying or excusing the low wages and dangerous
working conditions, high rents and poor housing they confronted. They also
faced interpersonal discrimination; Kate was only one of the many respondents
who described instances of racism that they experienced in Manchester.
Yet, to focus primarily on lines of difference reduces all social relations to
what Amin (2012, 169) calls a politics of the encounter based at best on the
success of organising a common endeavour. The political language becomes
one of alliance and coalition rather than of forging mutual relationships of
respect and affection. Based on our research, we argue for a re-examination of
the question of sociabilities, their temporalities and their political potential. As
our ethnography demonstrates, sociabilities often develop in situations in which
those who come together have unequal access to resources including information, skills and institutional networks. Yet social bonds, social cohesion so to
speak, emerges from a perhaps limited but potent shared set of experiences,

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N. Glick Schiller and A. alar

emotions and aspirations including a desire for human relationships. While they
may come to the relationship with different sets of experiences and social
possibilities, these relationships cannot be reduced to, explained by or categorised by these differences including those of culture but rather understood as
the creation of partial but significant domains of human commonality including
mutual aspirations.
Through his concept of conviviality, Paul Gilroy (2004) highlights the possibilities of openness in urban settings but his interest is often on the fusion of
cultures rather than sociabilities, with their shared emotions and aspirations that
may emerge in these social engagements. Ghassan Hage (2014, 236), focusing on
the social, has called for an examination a space of commonality, which
characterises any desirable intersubjective relation. We do it all the time with
people we care about despite being differently positioned in hierarchical structures. It is through an emphasis on social relationships rather than cultural
differences that we can acknowledge the possibilities and circumstances within
which commonalities emerge. Newcomers in Manchester and the local people
they befriended may have been brought together because they had different
degrees and kinds of knowledge, social positioning and skills but the social
relationships 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 article
before it is possible to ascertain the broader utility of the concept of sociabilities
of emplacement. This requires comparative research that examines emplacement
sociabilities within cities of different relative and relational positioning within
multiscalar hierarchies of power (see articles this issue, also alar and Glick
Schiller 2011; Glick Schiller 2012; Schmoll and Semi 2013). This is necessary in
order to understand the relationships between a citys multiscalar positioning and
variations in emplacement sociabilities as they emerge and within varying settings including the proximal, worksite and institutional settings explored in this
article.
We cannot ascertain from our Manchester research whether the lack of
institutional support in disempowered cities and the desperate circumstances
that newcomers faced in Manchester leads to the sociabilities we described. It
is possible that emplacement sociabilities are more visible in disempowered cities
than in more resource-rich cities where most research on migrant pathways of
settlement has been conducted. Certainly we are not advocating a public policy
that abandons newcomers based on the fact that some individual migrants in
Manchester were able to settle through sociabilities that emerged in the absence
of targeted institutional support for migrant newcomers.
We want to end by noting that such sociabilities may prove key building
blocks of the social movements that challenge the growing class disparities that
increasingly mark urban life. Although this argument cannot be developed within
this article, we do think this research provides insights into how sociabilities of
the 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 to
claim economic and social justice (Mayer and Boudreau 2012).
Within the domains of commonality that people regarded as local or native to
Manchester constructed together with migrant newcomers, the locally displaced
began to act and became concerned with injustice at home as well as abroad. It is
perhaps from the sociabilities, established by people who, despite their differences, construct domains of being human together, that the performed precarity
of dispossession is transformed into struggles against the growing disparities and
displacements of global capitalism (Butler and Athanasiou 2014; Susser 2012).
Acknowledgement
We 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, who
because of confidentiality agreements have been given pseudonyms.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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

Notes
1.

2.

Openness to commonality rather than to difference can be called situated cosmopolitanism, a topic explored elsewhere (Glick Schiller 2014; Glick Schiller, Darieva, and
Gruner-Domic 2011, see also Frykman 2015; Nashashibi 2007). Although some
respondents used the term friendship, not all used this term to encompass the
range of sociabilities combining mutual support and positive affect.
This may well have changed. The global financial crisis of 2008, rising unemployment, the subprime mortgage crisis that further displaced many city residents, including migrants, have made Manchester less welcoming to refugees. The Obama
administration mass deportations affect the daily sociabilities and trust possible by
both authorised and unauthorised migrants.

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NINA GLICK SCHILLER is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at
University of Manchester and Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology.
ADDRESS: Advokatenweg 36, 06114 Halle (Saale), Germany
Email: schiller@eth.mpg.de
AYSE ALAR is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vienna.
ADDRESS: Althanstrae 14, 1090 Vienna, Austria
Email: ayse.caglar@univie.ac.at