It has become relatively commonplace to claim that the world is becoming urban. However, it is only relatively recently that the domain of the urban has been considered as an area of study for those concerned with the politics of refugees. This chapter reflects on what is at stake in such work and presents an argument for exploring in more detail how a prosaic reading of the city as an ensemble of authorities, legalisations, and claims can help critical scholarship understand the politics of refugee mobility. Reflecting recent debates over the rescaling of politics, the chapter draws on a concern with ‘seeing like a city’, to argue that an urban perspective may offer a conceptual path to contest the exclusions of the state. Through mobilising this lens, and considering its empirical application in the work of urban sanctuary movements and refugee-led urban activism in the UK, the chapter considers how an urban politics of presence may reposition refugees in relation to authority, rights, and opportunities for belonging.

This chapter begins by summarising what have been identified in the book as the main principles guiding ethnomethodological work: rigorous analysis, meaning as indexical, reflexive, and accountable; the socially constituted character of the world; capturing the phenomenon, its haeccicity; an appreciative stance; naturalism; foundationalism. While these are open to different interpretations and by no means uncontested, they have influenced much ethnomethodological work and the rationales presented for it. There is then a discussion of the problems associated with these principles, as they relate to ethnomethodology’s criticisms of conventional sociology and the alternative form(s) of work it proposes. A series of antinomies that appear to be intrinsic to ethnomethodology are identified. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the prospects for resolving the debates between ethnomethodologists and conventional sociologists.

This chapter summarises and consolidates the principal themes of the book and rounds up the discussion by proposing new avenues for research – namely, strengthening the relationship between covert racism, the securitisation of minority groups and white victimhood, opening up a space for conceptualising securitisation as an affective practice and theorising the quantum view of radicalisation.

The first chapter in Part III deals with Abdellah Taïa’s autofictional work: his short fiction collections Mon Maroc and Le rouge du tarbouche, and his novels Salvation Army and An Arab Melancholia, with due reference to Taïa’s debut film, Salvation Army. This chapter firstly explores Taïa’s chosen genre and its articulation of embodiment. It then links the writing of the self to Taïa’s postcolonial queer melancholia, conceptualised in dialogue with Jean Starobinski’s notion of l’errance – errancy – which performs an assemblage of temporalities validating his position as a gay, Moroccan, Muslim, Arab man. It is argued Moroccan society’s homophobia triggers religious doubt in Taïa’s autofictional self, and a desperate embrace of matrilineal and Sufi versions of Islam is posited at a remove from Islamist Sunni literalness. The chapter also analyses Taïa's critique of colonial social hierarchies in contemporary Western sexual tourism. It is suggested Taïa’s most hopeful episode of homoerotic connection is enacted in the representation of queer diasporas, where same-sex desire articulated in transit temporarily dissolves man-made geographical and personal borders. Finally, it is proposed that Taïa’s articulation of the legacies of pre- and Islamic poetry inscribes his queer sensibility within the long continuum of Arab cultural history.

Football fandom has historically been dominated by men. The ultras style, in particular, becomes a site of hegemonic masculinity where participants perform their understandings of gender. Many performances are explicitly masculine, incorporating defence of territory, status, physical and sexual dominance, and violence. These are symbolised in images of warriors, valorised transgressive acts, or images of fraternal solidarity. Each communicates that there is one type of (hegemonic) masculinity that encapsulates the group, in comparison to their feminised rivals. Yet there is nothing explicitly masculine about fandom. Female ultras participate in the rituals, yet also have to navigate the explicit masculinity on display.

Data walking is a strategy for research creation and public engagement that breaks down hierarchies of knowledge and creates discussions about data based in a shared experience of observing and moving through space. This chapter describes the genesis of a particular approach to producing knowledge about data, in relation to ‘matters of concern’ encountered in particular local places.

At the beginning of 1910, D. W. Griffith had persuaded a reluctant Biograph to let him move his production base to California to take advantage of filmmaking in a very different climate. Justly commended for its carefully constructed and edited story and its exciting cross-cut climax, The Lonedale Operator marks a significant point in Griffith's development. There does seem to be quite a lot of evidence that German directors in particular accepted the cross-line edit schema as a necessary and relevant structuring device and occasionally it is possible to discover the schema being used in a quite complex way. Ewald André Dupont, born and educated in Germany, began his filmmaking career in 1917. Love Me and the World is Mine, one of his direction, was not considered a great success, and Dupont came to England and made two British/German co-productions, Moulin Rouge and Piccadilly, both filmed at Elstree Studios.

D.W. Griffith's approach to filmmaking was essentially personal and intuitive. He never worked from a script, even when making a film as long and complex as The Birth of a Nation. His The Mother and the Law was based loosely on the events at the Rockefeller Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. If there is some ambivalence about Griffith's intention, there can be no doubt that the discontinuity is not regarded by Griffith as unacceptable. The jumps and mismatches in Intolerance generate a tension within scenes which transcends continuity, the jaggedness of the cutting contributing to the content. Griffith's contribution to the development of filmmaking had been immeasurable throughout the Biograph years, he had taken a primitive form of cinema and refined it. Others were now building on his work and moving it in a different direction. Intolerance might be seen as a monument to alternative possibilities.

This chapter offers an innovative twist to securitisation theory by introducing the notion of indirect securitisations, which occur when the speaker resorts to covert language rather than an explicit language of threats and enmity. This type of securitisation is more likely in societies where what Tali Mendelberg refers to the ‘norm of racial equality’ prohibits racist speech. It also speaks to everyday racism by exploring how the indirect securitisation of Islam in the war on terror constitutes a covert form of racism. To this end, the first section draws on John Searle’s indirect speech act theory and unpacks how Bush, Obama and Trump have used indirect speech acts when speaking about Islam. Because indirect securitising speech acts allow actors to avoid worst possible outcomes and ‘save face’, this chapter argues that indirect securitising speech acts are an important tool in elites’ securitising playbook.

This chapter makes the case for pragmatist philosophy in planning theory and practice. I argue that pragmatism can help us to understand trends in contemporary planning theory, as well as develop a more promising future direction. The chapter introduces the two major branches of contemporary planning theory: (1) communicative planning and (2) radical planning. I explore how pragmatic planning can go beyond some of the limits of communicative approaches while also embracing the insights of radical planning. Emphasising early pragmatists’ emphasis on lived experience and the importance of pluralism, the chapter argues that pragmatism can connect different ideas in contemporary planning theory with great potential for practice, improving outcomes for publics.

Looking so intently at the work of D. W. Griffith during the crucial years of 1908 to 1913 runs the risk of losing sight of the wood for the trees. During this period, in Europe as well as America, enormous developments took place in the production, distribution and exhibition of films. Italian film production grew phenomenally during these years, with subjects that called for huge resources and which returned equally large profits to the businessmen and financiers who backed them. Before 1906, filmmaking in Denmark was very similar to that found in Britain, small independent companies and showmen making actualities, filming stage acts, and eventually experimenting with the dramatic possibilities of film. The scope and scale of the epic production provided Giovanni Pastrone with the opportunity to experiment and develop shooting and structuring methods that were quickly absorbed and reworked by others.

This chapter concludes the edited collection published as The power of pragmatism. It takes us back to the ‘quest for certainty’ in knowledge production with which we opened the volume. The chapter makes the case for adopting a pragmatic orientation to embrace uncertainty as both unavoidable and potentially productive. Recognising the seductive temptations of certainty that appear to provide order, progress, authority and respect, the chapter advocates the a priori acceptance of contingency as an antidote to dogmatism. This requires a sceptical orientation towards all statements of truth and a very different approach to knowledge production. The contributors to this volume advance and illustrate the power of pragmatism as a mode of knowledge production in the social sciences.