Sanctuary legislation is used in many different contexts. What the so-called ‘sanctuary cities’ have in common is that city authorities actively ignore people’s legal status when conducting business with their inhabitants. Thus, while drawing on humanitarian principles, sanctuary practices often have a pragmatic side. For example, the variety of legal and residency statuses of people living together in a city have often resulted in complicated organisational and social networks, the disruption of which by immigration authorities would endanger social peace. This tension has been framed as a contradiction between national requirements and a post-national local reality, a tension that sanctuary practices might be seen as responding to. This chapter draws on these contradictions between the national and the post-national to explore in metropolitan areas discussion of the future role of the local and of statehood is being made and remade in response to concerns around national identity and post-national populations. Sanctuary in these contexts emerges as an urban policy framing that results from such discussions. The chapter thus argues that if sanctuary legislation is a sign of political change in the perception and organisation of migration, it may also signal the changing nature and significance of the nation-state in an interconnected and increasingly urbanised world.

The first sound film, Don Juan, was made in August 1926. Many of the so-called sound films appearing over the next three years were basically silent films with occasional sections of spoken dialogue. During these years, many silent films were made without dialogue or sound effects, and they reveal the extent to which silent filmmaking had, at this point in its development, attained an extremely high level of creative artistry. This chapter discusses three films which had qualities that tended to disappear once speech was substituted for the richness and depth of meaning inherent in a structure based on the visual. The films are: Casanova, made by Russian exiles who fled to France following the Russian Revolution; Victor Sjöström's The Wind and G. W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl. The very first European sound films date from 1930. Diary of a Lost Girl was Pabst's last silent film.

The first chapter in Part II offers an exploration of Shamim Sarif’s first novel, The World Unseen and its 2008 film adaptation, and of I Can’t Think Straight (2008) and its eponymous film version. The narratives are approached in light of intersecting issues of race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality in apartheid South Africa and contemporary Britain. It is argued that Sarif’s depiction of the romantic relationship between two Muslim women in South Africa, and of a British Muslim woman and a Christian Jordanian woman of Palestinian heritage in contemporary Britain, challenge the Western stereotype of submissive Muslim and Arab women and of their male relatives as universally patriarchal. Sarif’s reinscription of a female homosexual vocabulary onto Arab-Islamicate cultures offers an antidote the erasure of female Muslim homosexuality in contemporary Islamic discourses. The chapter probes Sarif’s critique of Muslim homophobia. It also suggests that Sarif’s configuration of same-sex desire in relation to the dominant Western model of ‘coming out’, is homonormative; yet, despite the limited vistas offered by her characters’ middle-class perspectives, Sarif’s deployment of queer female bodies forge clandestine countermemories in the face of discursive suppression of Muslim female homosexuality.

In this chapter, the local situations of Birmingham and London are analysed. Although these were the two conurbations accommodating by far the largest number of immigrant children, they were reluctant to introduce dispersal. In Birmingham, some key Labour figures (Denis Howell, Roy Hattersley) campaigned actively in favour of it, and were dissatisfied when the city refused to operate it, afraid as it was of its detrimental effects. There, dispersal was a major bone of contention, until a voluntary type of dispersal was finally decided upon, which proved ineffective against ethnic-minority clustering in schools. In the Inner London Education Authority, dispersal was more massively rejected, mostly owing to a neighbourhood-school-based approach and to the specific resources London enjoyed. Lastly, this chapter studies the debate on the introduction of ‘banding’ in Haringey, which was presented as an IQ-based type of dispersal. This caused a major controversy after Alderman Doulton locally suggested West Indians had lower IQs than autochthonous pupils.

This chapter critically addresses the temporary reception of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe, by focusing on the everyday forms and practices of resistance that migrants put in place, primarily to counter the 'illegalising' policies of EU states. Conceptually, the chapter connects critical citizenship studies with autonomy of migration debates, to discuss the immobility – or the 'temporality of waiting' – of the prolonged moment during which migrants are stuck in the net of EU migration policies. The chapter focuses on a specific form of refugee response initiative – a self-reception system in the form of the City Plaza in Athens (Greece), a disused hotel that has been squatted by migrant activists and refugees to produce a space of accommodation and social support. The chapter argues that through City Plaza, we witness practices of 'autonomous geographies' that constitute forms of self-provided 'alternative' welfare, capable of extending and renegotiating the status of citizenship and enacting diverse forms of solidarity. In addition, they provide a discursive space of political legitimation, while acknowledging alternative and non-state forms of 'citizenship in motion'. The chapter is based on six months’ fieldwork in Athens, living and working at City Plaza as a refugee accommodation and solidarity space.

The disciplinary status of ethnomethodology is uncertain. It has been presented as a radical internal reform movement, aimed at re-specifying the focus of sociology; as an ‘alternate’ or supplement to it; as a discipline in its own right; or as a source of hybrid studies that complement various forms of practice. The cogency of each of these positions is considered. It is argued that ethnomethodology’s critique of social science, while salutary, seems to imply abolition rather than reform; and the proposal of its complementary relationship to conventional social science leaves open the question of why such a supplement is required. As regards ethnomethodology as a discipline, there are strong grounds for claiming that conversation analysis has provided a significant cumulative development of knowledge, but there are questions about whether its ethnomethodological character was essential to, or even compatible with, this. The ethnomethodological tradition of ‘studies of work’ has been less successful in this respect, and while it has made a practical contribution to some fields, once again it is not clear that this stems from the ethnomethodological character of the investigations. In conclusion, I suggest that the ambiguous status of ethnomethodology is built into its very nature.

This chapter explores lesbian Canadian language poet Erín Moure’s collection of poetry, O Cidadán. A challenging text, the collection offers a critique of established ideas of citizenship and formulates an alternative narrative of citizenship and community building, with Moure’s figure of the cidadán at its core. Embedded within Moure’s narrative are specific writing and reading practices that challenge the reader to act on the text, constituting the reader as a civic subject within this alternative narrative.

Since at least the middle of the twentieth century, the extent of the global ecological crisis, latterly labelled as ecocide, has become starkly clear, but political, cultural and ethical responses have been minimal. What responses there have been remain ineffectively stuck within the reductive logics of modern approaches to knowledge production and application. This chapter seeks to set out why pragmatist, non-representational and anti-representational approaches offer some hope for creative and effective responses, not only to the ecological crisis but also to the wider crisis of modern knowledge. I argue that these alternative forms of knowledge-practice are ecological in their embracing of process and interconnectivity, and that they offer forms of locally articulated, creative, radical incrementalism within the mesh-works of collective life. The chapter highlights the strength of pragmatic ways of thinking that unify thinking and doing, and the importance of making creative interventions in and beyond the academy.