Dzun, Julia;
(2025)
Beyond Welcome: The Politics of Migration and the City in Berlin.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
In the context of the "refugee crisis" of 2015-2016, following former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's (in)famous phrase, “Wir schaffen das!” (We can do this), Germany accepted over a million predominantly Syrian refugees who have been making home in Germany since. This PhD interrogates the history of this moment, taking Welcome as its object of study. While German Willkommenskultur (welcome culture) became one of the permutations of Welcome precipitated in this moment, this thesis defines Welcome as the broader relationalities that stem from various migration policies and state practices. It explores the relationship between diverse migration journeys to Berlin and the city itself. It focuses on different spatial formations of Welcome in and around one part of the city, Neukölln through which migration regimes become (re)produced, negotiated and resisted in the city. These include “intimate” settings—cafés, bars, collectives, cooperatives, spaces of leisure, youth centres and classrooms—and “iconic” spaces such as the popular and well-established street and square. Neukölln, a place with a longer fraught history of and relationship to migration and multiculturalism, has been an important place of arrival for newcomers both historically and in the present day. This PhD project is an ethnographic study of the everyday politics, street-level agencies, and discursive, material and affective encounters that have emerged between 2020 and 2022 in Neukölln, Berlin. It argues that Welcome reproduces racialized bordering regimes in everyday life. Those who are welcomed are made to continuously perform normative notions of refugee or migrant-hood resulting in a constant reaffirming, appraisal, and in some cases rescinding of Welcome. By attending to various spatial formations, it aims to show, on the one hand, the inherent bordering operations of Welcome, and on the other, the practices of and commitments to producing new geographies of attachment, affiliation and inhabitation taking place beyond it.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Beyond Welcome: The Politics of Migration and the City in Berlin |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215598 |
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