Episode 62 - Ayse Caglar
City-making through the Lens of Displacement
Theme: Migration & Displacement
Published: 15 January 2025
Summary
This SCAS Talks episode features Ayse Caglar, discussing cities through the lens of displacement. Caglar challenges the binary of "migrant" vs. "non-migrant," arguing that displacement affects diverse populations, not just migrants. She emphasizes the importance of understanding how place and time shape experiences of migration, highlighting the limitations of solely focusing on mobility. Caglar's research uses the concept of displacement to connect varied groups experiencing dislocation and dispossession within cities. She examines the contributions of migrants to city-making, underscoring their role in generating wealth and power, while also recognizing the simultaneous struggles for resources and justice they face. The discussion extends to her ongoing SCAS project investigating the historical and political geographies of cities, focusing on Linz and Essen.
Keywords
Migration, displacement, city-making, political economy, social anthropology
Suggested Link/s
SCAS page: Ayse Caglar
Personal website: https://ksa.univie.ac.at/institut/mitarbeiterinnen/professorinnen/caglar-ayse/ External link, opens in new window.
Transcript of the Episode
Ayse Caglar 00:08
Why I think it is important not to make that kind of a distinction with migrant and non migrant as a binary is that first, I think we could capture those dynamics of their lives and their livelihood and practices better. But the second is that in the current world of rising populism, which to a large extent, strives on issues about migrants and migration, I think it is important to remember, neither displacement nor dispossession are in the monopoly of migrants and refugees. Singling them out and both in narratives and policies and pitting them against the quote, unquote non migrants, I think, fuel populist narratives and politics further.
Natalie von der Lehr 01:07
Welcome to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode, I talk to Ayse Caglar, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and fellow at SCAS during this academic year, 2024/2025. Her research focuses on the interfaces of migration, urban restructuring, dispossession, displacement, confined labor, extractivism and transformation of statehood and the governments of cities. We will talk more about at least some of those aspects today, and we will also talk about her current book project at SCAS. And this is the second episode in our theme "Migration and Displacement". Very welcome to SCAS Talks, Ayse.
Ayse Caglar 01:55
Thank you.
Natalie von der Lehr 01:56
Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?
Ayse Caglar 01:59
Just very briefly, I'm a sociologist and an anthropologist, where most of my work has focused on, as you said, on the interface between urban and migration dynamics. And I think here I have to underline that for me, research on migrants is an entry point to address the way societies define themselves, draw their boundaries, narrate who belongs and who does not, and how these people are governed.
Natalie von der Lehr 02:36
So how did you get into this subject then?
Ayse Caglar 02:39
I think this has something to do with my personal biography. I have lived, studied and worked in very different places. Istanbul, Montreal, Berlin, Budapest, Florence, Göttingen, Vienna. Which, it is not a merit to live in very different places, but they exposed me to very different repertoires, canons, tropes and political narratives and scholarship also about the migrants, but also enabled me to observe the variations in migrants' presence in the economies, politics, narratives and imaginaries of those cities. And interestingly, I was a newcomer in all those places, but I was not identified as a migrant in all of them. I kept being in and out of the category of migrant without any changes in my legal status. So this enabled me to observe the varying different sets of constraints, but also opportunities that migrants were subject to in terms of participating to urban life and politics. But this experience made me realize strongly that locality mattered in the way migrants settled, even within the same nation state, space, in the same country. But when you look at the migration scholarship, it did not have a language to address these variations other than country or ethnicity based frameworks. This urged me, together with my long term colleague and co author, Nina Glick Schiller, to deal with the question how place mattered in migrant and placement beyond the nation state, and what were the dynamics behind. How could we capture this? This was the backstage of my thinking of the location of migrants in relation to cities of different size, scale and power. So to complicate this picture, the governance of those defined as migrants not only varied in space, but also in time. So people who were demonized as problematic newcomers could become cherished groups of people, and vice versa, depending on the geopolitical and historical conditions. So the worth and the worthlessness of "migrant", quote unquote migrant, for the cities were also a variable in time. In a nutshell, my work concentrated on trying to find an analytical vocabulary to capture this spatial and temporal variation and to see what they could tell us about the broader power structures the cities and migrant lives are embedded into.
Natalie von der Lehr 06:08
Very interesting thoughts and also interesting background. And I recognize some of that since I grew up in a city with working migrants who came in the 60s/70s to work in the industry, in the harbors, in the steel industry and yeah, and I've also relocated myself a couple of times. So I'm also a migrant in a way, but not seen like one.
Ayse Caglar 06:28
Yeah, I mean, if migrant becomes an empty signifier, then how are we going to answer the question of who is a migrant?
Natalie von der Lehr 06:37
Exactly. So let's talk a little bit more about that. Just what you mentioned, the term migrant. What are your thoughts on that?
Ayse Caglar 06:44
It's a very difficult question, because at one point you want to address particular group of people, but you do not want to fix it, because, as I told before, it is a kind of an empty signifier that you could get in and out and depending on time and space. So the first candidate for the basis of defining migrants is mobility. However, I think this is not free of problems, either. Not every mobile person, not even the cross border ones, is framed as a migrant in public discourse, but also in scholarship. And there are many, number of people who are designated as migrants, but who have not moved from anywhere. Think about the so called second generation, third generation migrants. Moreover, the problem that I had with the concept of mobility was that it puts the focus primarily on the action of movement. In a way, it disconnects the processes underlying that movement. And also, I think we should not forget that most of the lives of the people who are framed as migrants are shaped by immobility rather than mobility. Despite that, we inscribe a generic mobility to them. So instead of mobility, then I started searching for a concept, and there I found the concept of, I think, displacement as a much useful concept.
Natalie von der Lehr 08:23
Yes, and this podcast episode is within our theme "Migration and Displacement". Would you like to share your thoughts on displacement?
Ayse Caglar 08:31
Displacement is a concept that we sometimes, now it's used interchangeably with migrants and then the displaced. But as a concept, I think it does more, and it is an important one, because it allows us to shed light on series of interrelated processes which remain obscured when we look at only on the action of movement. And it is a concept that enables us to connect and situate migrants and migrant lives and practices in relation to broader social, economic, political processes elsewhere, not only at that place, and it offers also possibility for us to bring heterogeneous groups of people who were subject to various forms of dislocations, dispossession, which marked the lives of many urban residents. I will come to that why I think that the cities are important. It brings them into a common analytical framework. That this place might include the people who stayed in one place in the city and claimed to be natives, as well as cross border and internal forced migrants who have resettled, we could look at them all within the same frame of dynamic, the same frame of processes. Why I think it is important not to make that kind of a distinction with migrant and non migrant as a binary is that first I think we could capture those dynamics of their lives and their livelihood and practices better. But the second is that in the current world of rising populism, which to a large extent strives on issues about migrants and migration, I think it is important to remember, neither displacement nor dispossession are in the monopoly of migrants and refugees. Singling them out and both in narratives and policies and pitting them against the quote, unquote non migrants, I think, fuel populist narratives and politics further. So it is not only at an in terms of there is a conceptual reason behind that, but also in terms of politics that I think it is very important to recognize the commonalities that people are kind of the forces and dynamics they are exposed to.
Natalie von der Lehr 11:23
Let's look a bit more at the migrants and the displaced then. What role do they play in the city and in city making, shaping the city?
Ayse Caglar 11:32
First, I think I use the concept of city making very often, which it's not a jargon that I'm trying to use it, but I simply refer to multiple but connected processes through which the wealth and the power of a city is generated. So this is a very important way of, I'm not looking at it what kind of the urbanity that the cities that provide, these are very important. But my starting point is that how the city's wealth and power are generated. And I think it is very difficult. You said that, why then the migrants and the cities? I think their dynamics have been always interrelated. Cities have always been made by migrants. And I'm not here only referring to migrant labor, because we know that migrant labor has been very central to the urban economies. But I think it is also important to acknowledge that by becoming part of cities' political, cultural, religious, financial networks of various scale, the migrants, or you could refer the displaced become part of those multiple processes that contribute to the making of the power and the wealth of the city. So there is not only one way through the labor, those kind of connections. And I think in our contemporary world, cities and the displaced become more important. Cities become more important, not because I think that majority of world population will be living in cities in 30 years. This is important. But cities become more important because they become the frontiers of capital accumulation, but also at the same time, simultaneously, battlefield for resources, services, space, rights and justice. And the displaced are both the actors and subjects of all these processes and the battlefield. So as I mentioned, that they have been part of urban dynamics, but in our world, their claims for participation, for rights, pose a more drastic challenge to the redistribution of resources and services and the cities, which became already scarcer, so the cake is even smaller. And why this happened? Because this is the part of the kind of the form of urban development that the cities have chosen and continue in that process where there is a sharp reduction in terms of state contribution to those cities, which leaves the cities with the kind of the increasing pressures of how they would generate their power and wealth. But in an uneven field of globalized world. Cities have always been important. Migrants were always part of the cities, but now within the changing conjuncture and the nature of urban development, they become much more central to our thinking of, as actors also, not only our thinking for actors of how the livelihoods are made and how the claims and how people participate in life.
Natalie von der Lehr 15:32
So talking about geographical places, cities. I mean, this is where many migrants live, and the location is constant. I mean, the city is always there, but how do they change over time, then?
Ayse Caglar 15:43
Yeah. I mean, I think this is a very important question, but let me answer this in reference to my current projectat SCAS which concentrates on the political economy of displacement. So I laid the ground that is what those concepts said in my own work before and also mobilized but immobilized labor and economies of containment in city making. Here, I focus on two cities in Europe, Linz and Essen. Linz in Austria, Essen in Germany, which used to be centers of steel industry. These were particularly centers of steel industry, especially arms industry in World War Two. And these cities became industrial hubs through various form of confined and forced labor, and went through several changes in terms of that, as you say, that the location is constant, but they went through various changes. They went through downsizing, or kind of de-industrialization processes, especially after the end of 70s, in the 80s. Together with these transformations, their power, their demographic composition, labor regimes, but also narratives and imaginaries about themselves and their inhabitants, including the displaced change. So my project at SCAS tries to trace the different forms of confinement, economies and labor in the making of those places as industrial but also as post industrial cities. So I try to bring, as I said, the economies of I always say, mobile and immobile labor and the governance of the displaced. I try to bring those ones, these economies, and then the confinement economies, inscribed to different periods and regimes since the World War Two, until today, I try to bring them into a common lens of extractivism. Why is it important to do that? My aim here is to go beyond the compartmentalized narratives about the economic and political histories of the displaced and labor in these cities, because I think that compartmentalized historiography of cities, labor and displacement hinders us to see the common grounds connecting the different periods, processes, institutions and groups of actors. So I'm trying to find a way how we could look at them, rather than in a compartmentalized way. But how could we see a kind of a tread going there and building on? What I do is that, of course, I'm an anthropologist, I'm not an historian, but I use archival material, and ethnographic and archival research on those cities. I trace the historical and political geography of these cities with the aim of unraveling, hopefully, the continuities and mutations and the transformations in the discourses, but also the actors that shape the regulation of labor, quote, unquote, the care of the displaced, as well as the spaces and practices of containment. So it sounds abstract, but it's very concrete in the sense that I look at it, what kind of labor regime was adopted and how this containment confinement economies worked, what kind of the practices, whose were the actors of those confinement economies? And I think by taking this kind of a long durative perspective of the displaced, my aim is to bring different modes of economies of governance of the displaced as forced labor, coursed labor, asguest worker, as temporary commuting migrants, as asylum seekers and refugees who are inscribed to different periods and regimes into conversation. So what could we gain if we bring these groups of people who are put in different registers and different periods of governance and labor regimes, if we bring them into conversation, what could we see what we would not be able to see if we remained only in forced labor, only looking at guest workers, only as the commuters, temporary, circular migrants and refugees. So I think this will contribute to understand the broader debates on the histories of waged, unwaged, forced, voluntary labor, modalities of accumulation and the governance of displaced in global capitalism. And it might enable us to re-historize and re-theorize the politics of migration, labor regimes and city making. Maybe it would enable usto ask different questions about today's states and their regimes of governance. So this is the SCAS book project. And as you could hear, it builds upon my other former work, but goes very different directions.
Natalie von der Lehr 21:53
And as I understand going beyond, looking on how can we understand migration today and discuss, also have this kind of discussions around it.
Ayse Caglar 22:03
Yeah, in a way, rather than saying that no, no, no, that the migrants contribute so much, and migrants are valuable, they bring diversity, no that the migrants are worthless, trying to situate these discourses about deservingness, worth and contribution, not fixing them on the which group of migrants are better or not in what condition, but trying to bring it into it, like everyone else in the society, they place themselves within the constraints and opportunities that are available to them, and they vary according to very different places that they are embedded into. And not necessarily the ones in Germany are doing better, the ones in France are doing worse, but this is very variable, spatially and in terms of time wise. So I think it brings a different perspective. And not to forget, migrants had always been central as labor and for the economies and the production of wealth, but also the power of the places, usually, that has been disregarded. So this is my SCAS project.
Natalie von der Lehr 23:37
Let's move to SCAS then. You are a fellow here during this academic year, what is your experience of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment so far?
Ayse Caglar 23:46
I can only say very good things about SCAS and about my residence, because it provides excellent working and intellectual environment with a very interesting cohort of scholars. It's multi disciplinary, although we don't have natural scientists, but I really appreciate the work that was invested into bringing that cohort together. So what I see is that everyone has a kind of an conversation partner, but it is like a kaleidoscope. If you move it, you have a very different entry points coming from very different disciplines. It's like a kaleidoscope. If you move you will see very different kind of conversation partners. And this is very valuable. And as I said that I'm not a historian, but I benefit a lot from the questions that the historians ask or the political scientists ask, so I think that I really appreciate this kind of care invested in selection and the kind of way collegiality is enforced and encouraged. Given the disastrous way the path the universities have taken and are taking, I think, providing this kind of an intellectual environment and most importantly, precious time to think, reflect and write is the most valuable thing what a scholar could desire. And I think we are very lucky that SCAS is providing this in the best way.
Natalie von der Lehr 25:43
Thank you very much for coming here to the studio and talking to me.
Ayse Caglar 25:46
Thank you .
Natalie von der Lehr 25:46
And to our listeners, of course.
Ayse Caglar 25:48
Thank you.
Natalie von der Lehr 25:52
And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In this episode, I have talked to Ayse Caglar, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, and fellow at SCAS during this academic year, 2024/2025. We have talked about her work around migrants and displaced people and their role in making and shaping cities. This was the second episode in ourtheme "Migration and Displacement". In the previous episode within this theme, we have heard Sari Nauman talk about what Early Modern History can offer refugee studies. And this is episode 61. If you are interested in cities, you could also listen to episodes 54, 55 and 58 within our theme "Cities as mega-projects". SCAS Talks features a broad variety of topics, which is a reflection of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment at the Collegium. We are sure that there is something of interest for everyone. Tune in, find your favorite topic, or surprise yourself with something new. And as always, we're very happy if you can recommend SCAS Talks to your colleagues and friends. Subscribe to us and you won't miss any new content. SCAS Talks is available on podbean, Apple podcast, Spotify and most podcast apps. I would like to thank Ayse Caglar once again for talking to me, and thanks to you for listening. Bye for now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai