Challenging the boundaries of exclusive Europeanisation: How young refugees unsettle normative spaces of urban citizenship

Abstract

This article combines postcolonial and feminist geography approaches to make sense of refugees’ everyday lives in Europe. The article weaves ‘global’ accounts on migration and ‘local’ negotiations of inclusion and exclusion into one story: how young refugees, within urban spaces of arrival, challenge and reformulate European orders of belonging and citizenship. Departing from works that conceptualise arrival within the urban fabric, it suggests a postcolonial lens to young refugees’ intimate and embodied processes of emplacement. My explorations are based on field research conducted in the East German city of Leipzig. This local urban context provides unique insights into how migration-related phenomena are negotiated in a very particular European region in which postsocialist and postcolonial histories of migration intersect. Based on qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations, the article interprets the young peoples’ articulations as ways of ‘speaking back’ to and countering the violent and hierarchical segmentation of the (post)colonial world. In creating alternative spaces of belonging, citizenship and encounter, they decentre Europe from below.