Book conversation: Making Sanctuary Cities: Migration, Citizenship and Urban Governance (Stanford 2025)
Speakers
Professor Rachel Humphris (Queen Mary University of London) - Author
Professor Engin Isin (Queen Mary University of London) - Discussant
Venue
42, Bute Gardens Building, room 718
As authoritarian politics tighten their grip across the globe, from the assault on migrants in the US to the rapid expansion of deadly border regimes in Europe, the sanctuary city is often attacked as a site of resistance. Since the 1980s, when cities first pledged protection for people with precarious immigration status, sanctuary has been a rallying cry for those demanding dignity and belonging in the face of exclusionary nationalism. Yet sanctuary has also been contested and challenged. For some, it is a powerful tool against deportation and criminalisation. For others, it risks reproducing hierarchies, divides rather than builds solidarity, and shifts responsibility onto local authorities, narrowing the struggles for migrant justice.
In Making Sanctuary Cities (Stanford University Press, 2025), Rachel Humphris offers a rethinking of how citizenship is negotiated, resisted, and reimagined through sanctuary city movements. Based on long-term fieldwork in three pioneering sanctuary cities, San Francisco (USA), Sheffield (UK), and Toronto (Canada), Humphris traces how the sanctuary city plays out on the ground, and how its emancipatory promise often collides with the realities of governance.
This conversation between Professors Rachel Humphris and Engin Isin will grapple with the contradictions of sanctuary in an age of authoritarian resurgence. Together, they will ask: Can cities carve out spaces of belonging when national governments intensify deportation, dispossession, and exclusion? How do communities and activists fight for alternatives without being co-opted by the very systems they resist? And what radical possibilities for citizenship might emerge from these urban struggles?
