Papers by Walter Nicholls
Citizenship Studies, 2012
Does sustained and increasingly transnational immigration weaken the national character of citize... more Does sustained and increasingly transnational immigration weaken the national character of citizenship regimes? This paper addresses this issue by examining French responses to immigration over a 40-year period. In spite of the changing character of immigration and changing state strategies, all governments throughout this period have sought to maintain the national character by making full access to rights contingent on one's conformity to national values and moralities. As the government made accessing rights dependent on conformity to national norms, the legitimacy of immigrant activists seeking to expand their rights has depended on their abilities to conform to the rules of the national political game. Resisting marginalization therefore requires the assimilation of the immigrants into nationally specific political cultures, which contributes to reinforcing the national character of citizenship regimes. By examining the particular case of France, the paper aims to show how top-down and bottom-up processes by states and activists work in different ways to keep the nation at the center of citizenship regimes in spite of the ongoing and very real challenges presented by transnationalism and globalization.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015
In the global North, borders have experienced a renaissance in the last 25 years. Efforts to “get... more In the global North, borders have experienced a renaissance in the last 25 years. Efforts to “get tough” on undesirable immigrants have resulted in the growing concentration of power by national enforcement agencies and the devolution of responsibilities to thousands of civil servants, local officials, and others working directly with immigrants. Concentrating the powers of national immigration agencies has been seen as a necessary means to reduce access to legal residency, reinforce external borders, and remove unauthorized immigrants settled in national territories. Making bigger and more powerful immigration agencies was however not sufficient to plugging the many holes that allowed migrants to enter and settle in these countries. Plugging these holes precipitated the devolution of responsibilities to frontline public agencies, officials, and non-profit organizations; agents whose proximity to immigrants allowed them to function as effective relays of central state power (Miller ...
The British Journal of Sociology, 2008
As the title implies, the idea of this book is to explore the role of human reflexivity in relati... more As the title implies, the idea of this book is to explore the role of human reflexivity in relation to how we 'make our way through the world'. This book makes an important contribution to what is already known about being and becoming in the social world (of the northern hemisphere). Archer acknowledges that: 'It will not have escaped any reader's attention that the adjective 'reflexive' is in vogue for describing currently high, late or second-wave modernity' (p. 29). In this book, she takes reflexivity as the capacity to dialogue internally with oneself about one's life. This approach does not represent an attempt to jettison objective structural materiality, neither is it a desire to foreground unfettered agency. Rather, this book attempts to show how people 'mediate deliberatively' (p. 61) drawing on their structural settings in different ways in order to construct a life for themselves. Her point is that social mobility is a process, not a once and forever one-way activity, and thus, reflexivity, the capacity to deliberate, is itself differently articulated and rearticulated over time by different social actors. One of the most refreshing and innovative findings is the demonstration of the way in which reflexive identity work can sometimes take many years to result in any specific outcomes or changes. Although there are many books about social mobility and work, what makes this work distinctive is its concern with the ways in which we hold 'internal conversations' with ourselves. Archer has already made a distinguished contribution towards sociological analysis in her earlier work on culture, agency and internal conversation and this book is a synthesis of these critical concerns. This book draws on a study of a diverse group of 128 respondents who were asked questions about how they thought things over to themselves 'silently, in (their) heads' (p. 91). They were 'assured that far from everyone engaged in all of these inner activities and that people differed greatly in how much time, importance and value they attached to engaging in any of them' (p. 91). This book charts the various ways in which these inner dialogues can be categorized, and provides illustrations of how different groups of people talk to themselves about themselves and what this means in terms of inhibiting or facilitating social mobility. The book is divided into three parts. The first section contains a sociological analysis of the construct of reflexivity. It also explains how the qualitative research project that lies at the heart of this book was organized and conducted. An appendix is included in the book that details the sample construction as well as the methods related to accessing and categorizing different 'types' of internal thinking. While this is useful, I would have liked
Social Movement Studies, 2018
This article examines engagement with digitally networked, politically contentious actions. Maint... more This article examines engagement with digitally networked, politically contentious actions. Maintaining engagement over time is a key challenge for social movements attempting to network digitally. This article argues that proximity serves as a condition to address this challenge, because it configures the personal networks upon which transmission depends. This is a paradox of digital activism: it has the capacity to transcend barriers; however, proximity is essential for sustaining relations over time. Examining Twitter data from the #not1more protest campaign against immigrant deportations in the United States, quantitative and social network analyses show a differentiated development of engagement, which results in a particular geographical configuration with the following attributes. First, there is a robust and connected backbone of core organizers and activists located in particular major cities. Second, local groups engage with the campaign with direct actions in other cities. Third, a large and transitory contingent of geographically dispersed users direct attention to the campaign. We conclude by elaborating how this geographically differentiated configuration helps to sustain engagement with digitally networked action.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2016
This paper accounts for important shifts in the debate on immigration reform by considering the g... more This paper accounts for important shifts in the debate on immigration reform by considering the geographies of protest. Our findings point to the importance of urban hubs of activists and organisations that have worked with one another over extended periods of time. While these urban hubs constitute distinctive activist worlds, they have also connected to one another and coordinated nationwide actions through a variety of networks (social media, interpersonal, and inter-organisational). Using interviews, network analysis, and data on funding, we show how this decentralised network evolved and eventually outflanked nationally centred and reformist advocacy organisations in recent anti-deportation campaigns.
Antipode, 2013
This paper analyzes the rise and decline of social movements in Amsterdam and Paris, focusing in ... more This paper analyzes the rise and decline of social movements in Amsterdam and Paris, focusing in particular on the organizations of left-wing immigrant workers. These organizations performed crucial roles for new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s but were isolated and coopted in the 1990s and early 2000s. To explain why this is so, we engage in a dialogue with Jacques Rancière and develop an understanding of cities as strategic sites for both politicization and policing. Cities serve as sites of politicization because they are incubators of the relational conduits that enable activists from different sectors to engage with one another's struggles and look beyond narrow temporal and spatial horizons. However, cities also serve as sites of policing because authorities constantly attempt to reconfigure governmental arrangements in such a way that civil society serves as an extension of the government and comes to fulfill an instrumental role in the development and implementation of policy. Just as politicizing implies the widening of temporal and spatial horizons, policing implies the narrowing of such horizons. The analysis shows the social movements of the 1960s lost steam in two of the major hubs of the new left and reveals some of the more universal mechanisms through which cities generate or quell dissent.
Space and Polity, 2004
Have urban areas become strategic sites for the formation of justice movements? A justice movemen... more Have urban areas become strategic sites for the formation of justice movements? A justice movement is conceptualised as geographically extensive mobilisations that achieve a degree of territorial fixity at different spatial scales. It is proposed that a number of factors can encourage organisations implicated in this movement to make the urban arena a key front in their struggle to achieve justice. These factors include the intensification of urban inequalities, increased political opportunities resulting from the devolution of state ...
Space and Polity, 2004
The question posed in this Special Issue of Space and Polity is whether or not urban areas are in... more The question posed in this Special Issue of Space and Polity is whether or not urban areas are increasingly seen as the strategic geographical spaces for the emergence of justice movements. We claim that cities across Europe and North America have witnessed the rise of social movements claiming that urban processes and modes of management are fundamentally unjust. What factors account for the growing urban orientation of justice movements? What position do these movements occupy within a diffuse and multiscale ...
Social Movement Studies, 2012
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or s... more This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2013
Amsterdam and Los Angeles show divergent trends in minority politics. In Los Angeles, minority or... more Amsterdam and Los Angeles show divergent trends in minority politics. In Los Angeles, minority organisations that were divided along ethnic lines in the 1960s and 1970s joined together in a broad alliance for social justice in the 1980s and 1990s. In Amsterdam, by contrast, minority organisations became increasingly divided. Whereas, in the 1970s and 1980s, minority organisations were central actors in a broad alliance for social justice, they were marginalised in the 1990s. Contemporary leaders of minority background in Amsterdam do not call for social justice but, instead, in complete contrast to their counterparts in Los Angeles, allocate responsibility for minorities' marginalisation first and foremost to individual migrants and their culture. This paper develops a specific variant of field analysis to chart and explain these divergent developments in minority politics in both cities. It argues that the progressive alliance of Los Angeles could flourish because the local state did not have the capacity to selectively co-opt migrant organisations. The Amsterdam government, by contrast, saw an increase in its power to selectively co-opt them.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2008
In recent years there has been a growing interest in new participatory forms of urban governance.... more In recent years there has been a growing interest in new participatory forms of urban governance. This introduction provides readers with a basic review of current debates in the literature and a summary of the articles presented in the symposium. The introduction highlights two major tensions in the literature. First, many scholars operate under an assumption that plural actors can achieve a lasting and rational consensus on certain issues. Others believe that where there is consensus, there is also a silenced margin. For these critics, rather than focusing on building power-laden consensus, it is better to recognize and respect conflict and difference as normal parts of the governance process. Second, the introduction considers some of the possibilities for cross-national comparisons of participatory governance regimes. Scholars should not limit their analyses to institutional designs across countries but assess the importance of particular sociopolitical contexts in giving formal institutions their actual meanings and functions. The collection of articles in this symposium of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research assesses relations between governance, participation and democracy in cities, taking the debate in new directions. Our aim is to address the factors and conditions that favour or limit the participation of associations, movements and residents in the governance and decision-making processes of cities. The collection as a whole provides theoretical, conceptual and empirical insights at the interface between urban studies, geography, planning, sociology and political science to conceive new ways to achieve some of the promises of participatory governance. The articles have their origins at a series of sessions at the RC21 Conference in Paris (2005) Cities as Social Fabric: Fragmentation and Integration, 30 June-2 July. In this introduction we review the main lines in the literature with relevance to participatory governance and briefly summarize the individual contributions. Social scientists have approached participatory governance and democracy from distinct conceptual angles. On the one hand, many scholars have focused on deliberative mechanisms that incorporate plural actors directly into the decision-making processes of their cities. The theoretical assumption is that when rules are designed to ensure equality for deliberating parties, there is a greater likelihood that participants can find a rational
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2012
Guest editorial Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city Cities breed... more Guest editorial Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city Cities breed contention. Social movements usually express themselves in cities, but cities have nevertheless been seen merely as a backdrop, as the empty canvas on which social movement activity unfolds. We maintain that the city is constitutive of social movements. The defi ning features of cities-density, size, and diversity (Wirth, 1938)-provide the basic elements for contention to develop. Because cities are dense, they are likely to trigger confl icts over space. Because they are large, they have suffi cient numbers to sustain organizations of even small minorities. And because cities are diverse, they become the laboratories where new ties are forged and the battlegrounds where competing demands vie for domination. Contention thus emerges from the microinteractions between large numbers of diverse people living in close proximity. Social movements crystallize when people organize to collectively claim urban space, organize constituents, and express demands. Contention and movements emanate from cities but also stretch outwards as activists broker relations between local and their more geographically distant allies. The recent series of protests demonstrate how the urban is uniquely conducive of contention and reveals the linkages that connect contention between different locales (Salah Fami, 2009). All over the world, protesters occupied central areas, formed relations among themselves, and expressed their demands for equality and liberty. During the Arab revolutions, relational and cognitive connections permitted activists in Tripoli and Bahrain to imagine their struggles in very similar ways to those in Cairo, in spite of very different and uneven political opportunities, mobilization capacities, and cultures (Lopes de Souza and Lipietz, 2011). This movement then inspired protesters in Spain to take to the squares, which inspired Occupy Wall Street, which in turn spiraled into the global-yet geographically uneven (Uitermark and Nicholls, 2012)-Occupy movement. Cities not only breed contention; they also breed control. In their ongoing struggles to maintain order and power, local states and their partners develop strategies and techniques to direct the ebbs and fl ows of contentiousness constantly bubbling up from the urban grassroots. The city is a generative space of mobilizations and, because of this, it is also the frontline where states constantly create new governmental methods to protect and produce social and political order, including repression, surveillance, clientelism, corporatism, and participatory and citizenship initiatives. These techniques combine in different ways from one city to the next, making cities not only prime sites for contentious innovation but also the places where new ways of regulating, ordering, and controlling social life are invented. This collection of papers examines the dialectic of contention and control within cities. On the one hand, it identifi es when, how, and why cities breed contention. On the other hand, the papers explore when, how, and why governments and their partners regain control over urban space. The dialectic of control and contention is explored-in this introduction as well as in the various contributions to this theme issue-from a decidedly relational perspective (cf Emirbayer, 1997; Nicholls, 2008; 2009) that gives analytical priority to the mechanisms that make or break relations among and between challengers and elites. Such a relational perspective is very general and can incorporate a range of different views rooted in political economy, institutional analysis, or discourse analysis. Nevertheless, we argue that it is distinctive as it provides a different analytical emphasis than other frameworks for analyzing movements, especially the currently dominant way of analyzing movements in the 'right-to-the-city' framework.
Environment and Planning A, 2007
Investigating the geographies of justice movements The papers presented in this theme issue of En... more Investigating the geographies of justice movements The papers presented in this theme issue of Environment and Planning A investigate the geographies of justice movements in theory and practice. The aim is to provide readers with (1) new insights, in general, into the spatial constitution of social movements, and (2) more specifically an attempt to link traditional interest in social and spatial justice among geographers with the recent wave of research on new social movements. The collection offers a foundation for further theoretical and empirical enquiry at the creative interface between geography, social and spatial justice, and social movement scholarship. The papers have their origins in special sessions of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Denver (2005). Geographers have long displayed an interest in issues concerning social and spatial justice, while conspicuous in their relative absence are systematic attempts among geographers to grapple with social movements. Following the radical turn of the 1970s, under the intellectual leadership of David Harvey after Social Justice and the City (1973), geographers have sought research agendas that centralize questions of social, spatial, economic, and environmental justice (and as a consequence injustice). Rooted primarily but not exclusively in structuralist and, in some cases, historicalmaterialist epistemologies, a long tradition that survives today among a broad array of poststructuralist approaches has emphasized structuralist explanations of injustices that play down the explanatory power of agency. The relative lack of attention within geography to political agency of social movements in tackling injustices at a variety of scales rests partly on the continuing influence of structural perspectives. More specifically, work on the political economy of neoliberalization and the structuration of scale in contemporary neostructural human geography (eg Brenner, 2004; Brenner and Theodore, 2002) has originally been associated with conceptions of social movements placed in the context of political-economic and institutional terrains that are socially structured and reproduced by patterned, bounded, and more constrained forms of political agency. It is only more recently that some geographers have begun to work across the analytical registers of political-economy and social-movement approaches. Recent geographical inroads into the social-movement literature herald a mounting challenge to this impasse in the context of globalization and transnational political action. Over the last decade or so, various contributions to the geographical literature have assessed the role of space within collective political mobilization by flirting with poststructural theories. Some of the most important examples include Barnett and Low's (2004) efforts to spatialize questions of citizenship, the state, and democracy, and how spatial concepts of territoriality, public space, and the city make democratic polities possible in the wider frame of globalization. Sharp et al (2000) and Herod and Wright (2002) analyze processes of power and resistance from a novel confrontation of political economy and poststructuralism, while Herod (1998; 2001) focuses on the geographical dilemmas facing trade unions in the globalizing economy. Routledge's (1993) book is the first substantial attempt to link the geographical and sociological literatures on social movements, integrating poststructural theory, place analysis, and new social-movement theory to analyze nonviolent social movements in India. Miller (2000; 2004) presents the first comprehensive attempt to bring together the spatial constitution of social movements and in turn how Guest editorial
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2007
This paper examines the geographies of justice movements in Rotterdam in The Netherlands and Los ... more This paper examines the geographies of justice movements in Rotterdam in The Netherlands and Los Angeles in the United States. In their wider national and international frameworks movements in both countries continue to contest unjust forms of urbanization characterized by neoliberal initiatives that undermine the socioeconomic status of low-income residents. These movements are constituted by relations that stretch across several geographical levels. There remain, however, significant differences in their spatial organizational form: Rotterdam is characterized by loose networks of local associations which relate to constellations of nationally based Christian churches, unions, and humanist organizations, whereas networks between associations, unions, and university activists in Los Angeles have undergone institutionalization at the urban level. We show that movement territorialization is particularly evident at the urban level in Los Angeles while embedded at the national level in ...
Theory, Culture & Society, 2013
Over the last 20 years, the global North has witnessed the growing prominence of immigrant rights... more Over the last 20 years, the global North has witnessed the growing prominence of immigrant rights movements. This article examines how this highly stigmatized population has achieved a certain degree of legitimacy in hostile political environments. The central claim of the article is that this kind of legitimacy is initially achieved through the efforts of activists to represent undocumented immigrants in ways that resonate with the normative values of the nation. The author examines how activist networks are formed to present their cases within national political fields and the effects of this process on the political identities of immigrants and their respective citizenship regimes. The process of gaining legitimacy is contradictory. It contributes to nationalizing the political identities of foreigners and reproducing the exclusionary logic of national citizenship regimes. But in doing this, it encourages those who cannot conform to national values to embrace more radical and uni...
Qualitative Sociology, 2016
Building upon intensive ethnographic research on the undocumented youth movement in Los Angeles, ... more Building upon intensive ethnographic research on the undocumented youth movement in Los Angeles, this paper investigates the backstage work done by the leaders and activists within a movement to create cohesive and disciplined frontstage performances. These backstage techniques and strategies are important to examine because frontstage unity is not natural or automatic. As most campaigns are made up of heterogeneous individuals, organizations and groups, frontstage coherence is something that needs to be worked upon. We show that this essential backstage work consists of 1) training activists to become disciplined frontstage performers; 2) converging the feelings of activists through emotionally intensive disciplinary techniques; and 3) managing differences and conflicts in the free spaces of the movement. This paper thus aims to encourage scholars to look under the hood of public protests and give greater weight to studying the backstage work needed to produce strong and powerful voices. Keywords Ethnography. Social movements. Emotions. Free spaces. Undocumented immigrants. Los Angeles I walk over to the South Steps of City Hall in downtown Los Angeles. There are about 25 undocumented students standing on the steps in front of City Hall. They are dressed in different bright colored caps and gowns and they are holding signs stating BWe are not criminals, we are DREAMers,^BUndocumented and Unafraid,^BEducation, not deportation,^and BWe are the future of America.^There are 10 people standing in front of the steps looking at the DREAMers performing the mock graduation ceremony.
Social Movement Studies, 2019
Immigrants, and particularly undocumented immigrants, are oftentimes seen as disrupting the natio... more Immigrants, and particularly undocumented immigrants, are oftentimes seen as disrupting the nation state and destabilizing its boundaries. This paper develops the argument that immigrants can, under certain conditions, actively employ nationalist frames and language to support their rights claims. It presents a two-prong argument to explain for this outcome. First, immigrant rights advocates needed to select a 'master frame' that would will resonate with audiences in different regions of the country and counter the anti-immigrant discourses of their adversaries. These constraints favored the selection of a frame that was nationalist enough to make sense to middle-of-theroad Americans and liberal enough to provide 'deserving immigrants' a pathway to citizenship. Second, advocates needed to ensure that their frames were delivered with a degree of consistency in different localities across the country. This favored a robust and centralized discursive infrastructure that could exercise dominance over the production and diffusion of core messages. The paper uses a range of sourcesincluding interviews with leaders of immigrant rights associations, organization documents, training materialssupport the argument.
Social Problems, 2019
This article uses the case of immigrant day laborers to examine how municipalities develop polici... more This article uses the case of immigrant day laborers to examine how municipalities develop policies to integrate immigrants. In the 1990s and 2000s, local elected officials adopted integration policies to address the issues raised by the presence of day laborers in their jurisdictions. While first drawing on cases from around the country, the study then homes in on the case of Pasadena, California, to examine the implementation of integration in a moderately liberal city. The results reveal that many officials embraced both disciplinary and punitive tactics, making use of worker centers, aggressive ticketing, and solicitation bans for the purposes of controlling and governing an illegalized population. Some policies institutionalized the subordination of the population and heightened its deportability. The paper complicates the presumed binary between restrictive and integrative policies.
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Papers by Walter Nicholls