From Community Cohesion to Mobile Solidarities: The City of Sanctuary Network and the Strangers into Citizens Campaign

Challenging Legalistic and Culturalist Accounts of Political Community

One of the main limitations of the UK's integration and cohesion agenda results from its resting on the assumption that political community is primarily legally defined. Defining political community in terms of legal status brings to bear a territorial conception of citizenship that has its roots in a tradition of natural law (Bartelson, 1995) and that invokes a conception of sovereignty based on a strong distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (Walker, 1993). From this perspective community is largely limited to a sedentary form of membership, while political agency is primarily exercised in territorial terms by those whose legal status is beyond dispute. However, a growing body of work has challenged this notion of community over recent years (see Balibar, 2002). In particular, there is a growing body of work focusing on ‘acts of citizenship’ that disrupt institutionalised legalistic and culturalist conceptions of political community (see Isin, 2008; 2009). Such works open to question sedentary forms of membership and a territorial politics confined to those with legal status. They thus introduce alternative possibilities for understanding collective engagement and political subjectivity (see Aradau et al., 2010; McNevin, 2006; Nyers, 2003; 2006; 2008; Squire, 2009a).

Despite such interventions opening up new ways for understanding collective engagements and political subjectivity, an account that is aligned with an emphasis on sedentary membership and territorial legal status would seem to prevail in debates around integration and cohesion. This reflects the supplementary role that the notion of cultural community plays in these debates. A cultural conception of community is supplementary to the legalistic conception but does not displace the territorial, sedentary and status-orientated account of politics outlined above. In this regard, the dynamics of movement and diversity tend to be erased from a culturalist rendering of community and cohesion. For example, while the report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion quoted above has a strong emphasis on cohesion and integration as a dynamic process of interaction, the simultaneous emphasis on differentiated groups brings us back into the essentialising identitarian realm of cultural categorisation. Indeed, a similar move would seem to occur within academic studies. Although there has been a shift toward the development of a more relational account of cohesion over recent years, conceptual analyses often reaffirm assumptions of ethnic and cultural difference while shifting the ‘burden’ of integration on to new arrivals (e.g. Ager and Strang, 2008). Contemporary debates around integration and cohesion in this regard would seem to overlook some of the important insights that have emerged in the literature on migration and belonging over recent years, specifically those approaches that focus attention on the multiple, intersecting and dynamic processes of identification (e.g. Erel, 2009).

An engagement with critical accounts of migration and belonging remains important in addressing the limitations of the integration and cohesion agenda, because such approaches challenge assumptions regarding the ‘natural’ division of communities by showing how cultural and ethnic categories are produced through racialised and gendered processes of differentiation (Yuval-Davis, 1997). What is important about this critical literature for our purposes is that it highlights the dynamic and relational character of collective engagements, while at the same time challenging a culturalist account of community membership. Despite the important insights of such scholarship, however, the implications of such conceptualisations do not seem to have been fully digested in debates around integration and cohesion. This would seem in part to reflect the shortcomings of much scholarship that broadly fits within the anti-essentialist frame of reference. Analyses that focus on the fluidity of identity formation have become increasingly widespread within the field of migration studies (see Nassari, 2009). However, the tendency of many studies to focus on fluid processes of identity formation effectively limits their ability to challenge the culturalist conceptions of community on which contemporary debates around integration and cohesion rest. Indeed, such approaches adopt a distinctly culturalist account of community where they focus attention on the shifting identifications of members within pre-defined national or ethnic groups (e.g. Phillips and Potter, 2009). The dynamism of such analyses is thus questionable, while their reduction of diversity to cultural ‘difference’ lends itself to oversight of the complex relations that multiple movements produce. Rather than addressing the tensions and complexities that are opened up by the multiplication of social, economic, cultural and legal diversities, such analyses thus lend themselves to an integration and cohesion agenda that is limited in scope.

That the integration and cohesion agenda remains wedded to such culturalist conceptions arguably reflects the strong influence of a social capital approach in analysing issues related to social cohesion, coupled with the scarcity of scholarship that adopts a more critical perspective toward this literature (see Coole, 2009). Robert Putnam's (2000); (2007) theory of social capital has become highly influential in relation to debates surrounding integration and cohesion over recent years, as is evident in the growing body of work addressing the theory that ethnic diversity reduces levels of social trust (e.g. Alesina and La Ferrara, 2002). This has been developed explicitly by analysts such as Francisco Herreros and Henar Criado (2009), for example, who suggest that the integration of immigrants is more effective where aggregate levels of social trust are high. What is problematic about such accounts from the perspective developed in this article is that the analysis of integration or cohesion seems to assume a conception of communities as ‘naturally’ divided along cultural and/or ethnic lines, while immigrants are disadvantaged because they are assumed to be culturally ‘different’. Regardless of the fact that some social capital analyses have challenged the theory that cultural diversity has a negative causal impact on trust, diversity on this account is problematically conceived of in terms of cultural or ethnic difference while immigration is implicitly posed as a potential threat to social trust. Such an approach is problematic on two counts. First, it is empirically limited because it does not adequately account for the significance of emerging movements such as those associated with City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens, which are characterised by the formation of dynamic relations of solidarity in which cultural distinctions as well as legal status are extraneous. Second, such an approach is politically problematic because it potentially privileges some residents over others – namely those with legal status and/or those who assimilate within the unified communal ‘whole’ over those without legal status and/or who represent ‘difference’ that might disrupt the unified communal ‘whole’.

In summary, it would seem that current analyses of cultural difference and social capital are problematic because they fail to challenge the legalistic and culturalist assumptions on which the integration and cohesion agenda rests. Such an approach limits our understanding of collective engagement and constitutes ‘established’ residents as the privileged subjects of integration and cohesion over those whose presence is more fleeting or less certain. As a rejoinder to this, it might be argued that the limitations of such an account of political community are acknowledged in the official focus on integration and cohesion as a dynamic process. ² However, what the analysis here suggests is that a focus on presence and participation is not enough if the movements and diversities around which collective engagements occur are examined through the lens of cultural difference. Such a focus would seem to foreclose a fuller appreciation of the dynamism of contemporary solidarities while at the same time implicitly reaffirming the importance of cultural membership and legal status. This means that mobile solidarities such as those evident in City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens fall outside debates around integration and cohesion despite their importance in understanding collective engagements and political subjectivities in a context of intensified movements and diversities. What this also means is that the movements and diversities through which City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens are constituted are often assumed to undermine the social trust that is required for community cohesion. It is in this regard that a consideration of the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into Citizens campaign is important in critically addressing the limitations of the UK's integration and cohesion agenda. Such mobilisations are interesting for our purposes, because they enact solidarities in a dynamic form while simultaneously challenging the privileging of ‘established’ residents over those whose presence is more fleeting or less definite.

Constituting Mobile Solidarities

The activities around which the City of Sanctuary network is organised are crucial in terms of a focus on mobile solidarities, because they allow us to see how the network emerges out of (as well as contributing toward the formation of) dynamic collective engagements in which distinctions between new arrivals and ‘established’ residents become irrelevant. An example in this regard is the Terminus Initiative, which forms a key activity in the Sheffield movement and which was initiated by several Sheffield churches that support the City of Sanctuary network (interview, JA and A; Barnett and Bhogal, 2009). ⁹ One of the Terminus Initiative activities is a cafe in the Low Edges region of the city, which was set up in part as a response to the conditions of asylum seekers within the area and which has run alongside a women's conversation club and a voucher exchange drop-in. There are two ways in which this cafe is described by interviewees. On the one hand, it is described as emerging out of, and further advancing, engagements and solidarities between ‘established’ residents and new arrivals with the aim of supporting asylum seekers and refugees. As a church minister involved with Terminus says: ‘we [church members] were doing a lot of things with people in the community. Issues arose out of trying to meet people's needs and support them. And we'd become very, very much – we'd become more aware of asylum seekers and refugees in particular’ (interview, JA and A). On the other hand, the cafe is described as providing an opportunity for asylum seekers to carry out voluntary work in a context whereby they are denied the right to work during the processing of their claim. As one of the founders of the City of Sanctuary network suggests: ‘the idea we have here is of a cafe – a sanctuary cafe – because a lot of those people who are still awaiting status or have been refused it, you know, they can't actually work, [but] they can do some voluntary activities, gain some voluntary activity’ (interview, IB). The Terminus cafe in this regard can be seen as an activity that emerges out of dynamic collective engagements. Critically, the cafe also functions as a site for everyday minor acts that challenge institutionalised hierarchies of inclusion/exclusion, specifically those that are manifest in policies that deny asylum seekers the right to work.

What is perhaps most striking about the Terminus cafe is that the collective engagements that the initiative fosters would seem to blur the boundaries between ‘guest’ and ‘host’ (or ‘supporter’ and ‘recipient’); boundaries that are strongly associated with a territorial conception of political community. It is important to bear in mind here the quote from the church minister interviewed above, which would seem in part to paint a picture of established community members supporting new arrivals. Nevertheless, while there clearly are some important differences in the personal and social circumstances of many asylum seekers and refugees that condition their specific support needs, an analysis of the Terminus cafe suggests that the mobile solidarities that the initiative invokes effectively invert the relation between guest and host, albeit momentarily or in a partial sense. For example, one asylum seeker who has been involved with the initiative describes her experience of the Terminus cafe as follows: ‘we [volunteers] are cooking a load of food from other countries together, and then one day they invited immigration and the police to interview. And me, I talk, they eat also my food, [my] cooking – they enjoy[ed it]’ (interview, A). In this example asylum seekers and refugees not only ‘host’ relatively ‘established’ residents and workers as their ‘guests’, but they also momentarily or partially disrupt social hierarchies through their ‘hosting’ of police and local immigration officers. While there are clearly limitations both in terms of the wider effects and potential endurance of such disruptive minor acts, we can nevertheless see here that distinctions between ‘established’ residents or community members and those with a fleeting or uncertain presence become blurred through such engagements.

Indeed, it would seem that many of the everyday activities around which the City of Sanctuary network is organised do much more than simply promote a culture of hospitality. In effect, they trouble assumptions about who does and who does not have the right to be present in the city, and in so doing undermine the territorial hierarchies of inclusion/exclusion on which a frame of hospitality rests. ¹⁰ The conversation clubs that are organised across Sheffield are a good case in point here. Conversation clubs were originally set up to provide opportunities for new arrivals to practise their English, yet are simultaneously constituted as spaces of collective engagement in which people of various cultural or ethnic backgrounds, of various legal statuses and of various social and economic positions have the opportunity to engage with one another (interview, JA and A; interview, RS). As one asylum seeker describes, people at the conversation clubs come from various backgrounds: ‘from Iraq, Somalia, Ethiopia, the Ivory Coast – we are all mixed’ (interview, OW). In this context, who counts as a ‘local’ is by no means clear-cut, as is evident in the following statement made by one of the founders of City of Sanctuary:

Note that local people are described here both as practising their English and as forming relationships with asylum seekers, indicative of the blurring of distinctions between established/fleeting residents. Conversation clubs in this regard can be seen as highly dynamic social spaces through which the intensified movements and diversities that cut across the city are condensed. Legal status, cultural background and social or economic position do not serve as a limit to involvement in such clubs, and in this regard participation through presence rather than through status or membership becomes increasingly important.

Participation through presence remains important in an informal sense when it comes to engaging as part of City of Sanctuary or Strangers into Citizens, but is not the only form of participation evident in each of the mobilisations. Formal mechanisms of participation can be enacted within City of Sanctuary in one of two ways. First, participation can be enacted through affiliation with or membership of an organisation that has publicly expressed support for the movement. Participation in this sense primarily occurs through organisational activities (e.g. befriending and advocacy work, inviting asylum seekers to hold positions of responsibility, creating volunteering placements, providing emergency accommodation). ¹¹ London Citizens also supports participation through organisational membership, although in the latter case participation includes activities such as voting collectively on campaign resolutions, signing petitions or attending rallies and demonstrations. Alongside this, both City of Sanctuary and London Citizens provide opportunities for individuals to play a more active role in shaping the mobilisation itself. The differences between each mobilisation are more visible when we look at this second set of formal participation mechanisms, however, with City of Sanctuary showing evidence of a much more networked form of organisation than that associated with Strangers into Citizens. London Citizens has a highly centralised approach that is based on a system of ‘community leaders’, and at times would seem to risk working from the top down as much as from the centre out. Thus, community leaders are identified by local organisers in order to ‘feed up’ ideas for campaigns as they relate to the needs of community members and in order to ‘feed down’ ideas about the importance of supporting any given campaign (interview, AI and LZF; interview, JP). In contrast, City of Sanctuary works with a more traditional organisational structure based on a management committee and open membership, although this varies according to the specific city in question. ¹²

It is important to note that organisation-based and mobilisation-orientated activities are often not limited to members alone, and that there is also a series of less formal avenues for participation through activities that are open to all. For this reason, it is critical that the informal dimensions of participation are taken seriously. An important success for Strangers into Citizens, for example, is its ability to mobilise a wide range of groups and individuals around the issue of regularisation through large-scale demonstrations (interview, AI and LZF). Similarly, City of Sanctuary includes a broad spectrum of cultural or social activities that are open to anybody who is able and willing to participate at a given time. Examples in this regard include organising/attending a cultural event, facilitating/participating in language exchanges or organising/attending countryside walks. ¹³ Indeed, the very success of many of the more formal organisational activities listed above effectively entails the involvement of those who are not formal members of City of Sanctuary. After all, activities such as befriending and volunteering are by definition social activities that involve those not directly affiliated with City of Sanctuary itself. Despite participation being formally organised around membership in each of the mobilisations in question, it is thus crucial that we take seriously the broader and more informal forms of participation that are central to the activities around which City of Sanctuary and London Citizens are organised (see Squire, 2009b).

Informal forms of participation are particularly important to bear in mind given the additional pressures that leave some unable or unwilling to participate in the mobilisations in a more formal sense. For example, asylum seekers, refugees and irregular migrants are often keen to avoid activities that may draw attention to their whereabouts, status and/or activities. In particular, migrants who have experienced political oppression or violence often have compelling reasons that condition their desire to avoid explicitly political activities. Moreover, asylum seekers, refugees and irregular migrants face significant challenges in terms of their everyday survival, which limit or condition their ability to participate in mobilisations such as City of Sanctuary or London Citizens. As one of the founders of City of Sanctuary suggests: ‘They don't have that luxury, their priorities [are to] actually save themselves, [they are] doing all they can, and they're all embroiled in complicated processes which take a lot of their time and energy and effort’ (interview, IB). In addition, length of residency and depth or breadth of connections with people locally can have an impact on an individual's ability to participate in the activities around which City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens are organised. The deportation or dispersal of migrants and asylum seekers is a particular limitation that neither City of Sanctuary nor Strangers into Citizens effectively addresses in order to facilitate the ongoing participation of those no longer located within the area. Presence in this regard is central to formal and informal participation in such mobilisations, while informal participation is critical to the involvement of those whose presence in the city is more fleeting or less certain.

Despite the limitations of mobilisations that are constituted through an informal form of participation through presence, the activities around which City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens are organised effectively challenge conceptions of community that are based on cultural membership or legal status because they facilitate the enactment of solidarities that cut across such distinctions. As we have seen, activities based on participation through presence often render legal status and cultural background insignificant while providing opportunities for minor acts that disrupt social hierarchies. This is clearly not to say that legalistic or cultural conceptions of community are finally transcended by City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens, nor is it to say that social hierarchies are overturned once and for all. Rather, it is to say that such mobilisations entail a form of participation through presence that facilitates the formation of dynamic or mobile solidarities and which thus troubles the legalistic and culturalist distinctions that inform the UK integration and cohesion agenda. As such, these mobilisations demand an alternative analytical framework from one that is orientated toward the categories of cohesion, integration and community. Indeed, an approach centred on cohesion, integration and community tends toward a focus on legal status and cultural affiliation, and in this respect overlooks the dynamics of collective engagement that are central to an understanding of City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens as mobilisations through which mobile solidarities are constituted. In this regard an alternative analytical framework is required to address the importance of such mobilisations to questions of collective engagement in a context of intensified movements and diversities. It is here that the article turns to the categories of solidarity, mobility and citizenship.

Analysing Mobile Solidarities

The formation of mobile solidarities that cut across legal and cultural categorisations would seem to be mirrored in the current multiplication of legal and cultural categorisations, both of which can be interpreted as emerging in a context marked by the intensification of movements and diversities. For example, the proliferation of more ambiguous legal statuses such as dual national or person with temporary leave to remain can in part be understood as emerging where increasing movements of people render clear-cut legal categories difficult to maintain. ¹⁴ The intensification of human movements in this regard is inseparable from the multiplication of legal and cultural diversities. Yet the analysis in this article suggests that diversities cannot be reduced to cultural difference or divergent legal status, but need to be approached more broadly in terms of a variety of diversities – social and economic, as well as legal and cultural. These distinctive forms of diversity would seem to be multiplied in complex ways where the movements of people are intensified, as we will see below. What an analysis of mobile solidarities brings to the table in this context is an appreciation of the different possibilities that are opened up by the multiplication of movements and diversities. As well as opening up possibilities for mistrust and hostility, such movements and diversities also open up possibilities for the dynamic formation of mobile solidarities that cut across institutionalised hierarchies of inclusion/exclusion.

A focus on solidarity rather than on cohesion or integration is critical in developing an understanding of how mobilisations such as City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens mobilise the dynamism of human movements and diversities. Solidarity is important for several reasons. First, as a socio-political concept, an emphasis on solidarity allows for an exploration of the ways in which social relations are constituted politically through processes of mobilisation or collective action. This is evident in Pierre Rosanvallon's (2000) conceptualisation of solidarity in terms of a ‘community of sentiment’ that is based on involvement. Such a focus differs in important ways from the focus on trust in the social capital literature, with the latter developing a psychosocial account of individualised or collective reactions to social change rather than examining how changing social conditions are politically navigated. Second, as a relational concept that by definition focuses attention on struggles of a collective and political form, an analytics of solidarity demands that we are sensitive to the tensions that are constitutive of any collective endeavour or social formation. Such an approach does not deny such tensions, nor does it entail a drive toward their elimination or assimilation. In contrast, an analytical framework that takes cohesion or integration as its starting point would seem either to overlook such tensions in favour of the preservation of cultural ‘difference’, or to struggle to do away with such tensions based on the assumption that they will inevitably turn to hostility (see Squire, 2005).

To focus attention on mobile solidarities is to be aware of the potential for hostilities without assuming hostility as a starting point. It is also to shift attention away from an ideal of unification toward the dynamics of disagreement and negotiation, while maintaining sensitivity to disjuncture (see Rancière, 1999). In contrast to Rosanvallon's definition of solidarity as forming a ‘community of sentiment’, an analysis of mobile solidarities thus focuses attention on those dynamics that condition the inevitable failure of any social formation to become a community qua communion (see Nancy, 1991). While movements of people and diversities of various kinds certainly seem to be intensified at the current juncture, an analytics that takes mobility seriously works from the assumption that collective engagement by definition entails movements and diversities as well as solidarities and/or hostilities. Moments of dynamism and fixity thus remain in a relation of continuous tension from the perspective developed here (see also Aradau et al., 2010). In other words, mobility understood in terms of multiple movements and diversities is neither conceived of in a purely historical sense as an emergent condition, nor in a purely theoretical sense as antithetical to fixity, but rather is examined as a constitutive dimension of social and political life. Mobility may be a category of particular significance at the current juncture where the dynamics of movements and diversities are intensified, but this is not to say that it has ever been a category of insignificance.

Mobility serves as a limiting concept to community where the latter is conceived of as a unified whole. If we take seriously the analysis of City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens that has been developed here, then it would seem that we need to shift attention away from the relatively static category of community toward the more dynamic category of citizenship. This shift of focus should neither be interpreted as an attempt to transcend or evade the drive toward a cohesive social formation nor as a move denying the importance of trust or the potential for hostility in collective engagements. Rather, the move toward an analytics of citizenship might be interpreted as a shift that aims to bring to the fore those collective engagements that stand in tension with the drive toward a unified community and that challenge the hierarchies of inclusion/exclusion through which the struggle to maintain a Utopia of the unified whole ensues. An analysis that takes citizenship rather than community as a starting point is critical in this regard, because it allows us to shift away from an approach that emphasises changes to an already established communal formation toward an approach that examines those acts through which citizenship is created ‘anew’ (see Isin, 2008; 2009).

Rather than taking the stability of a communal whole as a starting point and analysing intensified movements and diversities as disruptive of this, an analysis of acts of citizenship reminds us that such disruptions are a necessary feature of any social formation. An emphasis on acts of citizenship also shifts from the social to the political level without constructing a divide between the two, allowing us to follow the move from a social analysis of collective engagements to a political analysis of collective mobilisations. Specifically, a focus on the way in which the social activities around which City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens are organised create sites for minor acts in which asylum seekers and irregular migrants claim a rightful presence within the city is important, because it opens up the scope for a political analysis that challenges processes of exclusion or marginalisation (see Lefebvre, 1996). ¹⁵ Rather than simply analysing asylum seekers and irregular migrants as subjects who are excluded from the remit of integration and cohesion policies, such an approach allows us to examine the way in which they act as political agents who have a social presence. Citizenship in this regard is not approached in terms of communal rights and obligations that arise from a social contract between members of a given community, but rather it is approached in relation to the ongoing creation and recreation of political subjectivities and social formations (see Isin, 2008; 2009).

The critical importance of an analytics of solidarity, mobility and citizenship is evident if we consider the case of an asylum seeker who was interviewed as a participant in City of Sanctuary. What is striking about this particular example is that the asylum seeker in question works as a radio broadcaster in Sheffield and in this capacity described a situation in which he interviewed the local mayor on the issue of asylum on a local radio show (interview, OW). Already, we can see how the movement of this individual into the city invokes a more complex set of diversities than a reductive account of cultural difference would suggest. Various diversities become important here, with the individual in question simultaneously occupying a position of legal, social and economic marginalisation (as asylum seeker) as well as a position of social status (as broadcaster). As analysts have frequently pointed out, many asylum seekers and refugees within the UK are highly educated and come from a position of social status and often economic prosperity. In this regard, even a single individual can embody a series of diversities that run in tension with one another. What an analysis of citizenship acts, mobility and solidarity brings to the fore here is the way in which the very act of interviewing the mayor by this individual entails a challenge to social hierarchies and relations of authority. The individual in question can be seen as challenging the assumption that his status as asylum seeker relegates him to a position of one who is denied both the right to work and political voice, and thus as mobilising his social presence in terms that allow him implicitly to claim rightful presence within the city. Perhaps most fascinating here is the way in which the interviewee describes his individual case as opening up the potential for solidarity as well as hostility. Thus, he describes: ‘one of my friends, who was working here voluntarily [at the Radio Station] …he never knew I was an asylum seeker and he was always against them. But the day I tell him about ourselves, he was in tears’ (interview, broadcaster from City of Sanctuary). The story that this interviewee tells us is one that points not only to the potential for hostilities in a context of intensified movements and diversities. It also points to the potential for the formation of solidarities in a context where intensified movements and diversities are multiplied in ways that are complex and often unexpected.

From Community Cohesion to Mobile Solidarities

This article has developed an analysis of City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens based on the categories of solidarity, mobility and citizenship. Such an analysis is critical, it has been argued, if the importance of the mobilisations in relation to debates around integration and cohesion are to be adequately understood. The UK integration and cohesion agenda remains caught within a frame of cohesion, integration and community. As such, it works on the assumption of ‘natural’ distinctions, which are associated with legalistic and culturalist conceptions of community and which invoke sedentary and territorial notions of membership and status. Such a frame is unable to address City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens, which defy the very distinctions on which such an approach is based. Indeed, City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens not only provide a challenge to legal distinctions between citizens and non-citizens and to cultural distinctions between different ‘community groups’, but they also provide a clear challenge to simplistic accounts of cultural diversity as having a negative impact on social trust. The very emergence of these mobilisations questions the simplistic assumption that hostility towards ‘different’ people is an inevitable outcome of intensified movements and diversities, because each is founded to a greater or lesser extent on collective engagements that promote such movements and diversities. Moreover, distinctions between ‘established’ residents and new arrivals are blurred through the activities around which these mobilisations are organised, while distinctions of legal and cultural forms become extraneous to their activities. In this regard the assumption of hostility is challenged on various levels. What is most striking about City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens from the perspective developed here, however, is that the activities around which the mobilisations are organised create sites for what we have called minor acts of citizenship, through which social hierarchies and relations of authority are momentarily or partially disrupted and/or overturned. While the intensification of movements and diversities serves as an important condition under which these minor acts emerge, it is in the mobilisation of dynamic collective engagements that minor acts of citizenship are constituted as mobile acts of solidarity. A form of participation through presence is critical to the development of these minor acts and mobile solidarities. Whether or not City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens can extend beyond the limitations of physical or social presence, however, remains to be seen.