Infrastructuring Arrival - by Karel Arnaut & Luce Beeckmans (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A bottom-up perspective on how newcomers do integration through arrival infrastructuring.

Based on extensive ethnographic research across diverse European contexts, this volume repositions migrants' arrival not as an exception or a crisis, but as a constitutive condition of contemporary societies. The lively, interactive processes through which newcomers, together with a wide range of actors, rebuild and transform the socio-material settings in which they arrive and carve out their future belonging, are captured in the concept of 'arrival infrastructuring'.

By foregrounding the everyday agency in arrival infrastructuring, this volume proposes a 'minor integrations' framework that re-embeds the contested term 'integration' within an alternative discourse of world-building, in the process closely attending to the structural forces that limit and channel such agency. The 'minor' in 'minor integrations' highlights the continuous work of arrival infrastructuring in our contemporary migration societies: the everyday practices of socialising and social reproduction through which future belonging is created, and the urban fabric maintained, repaired and transformed.

Infrastructuring Arrival is a companion volume to the Integration Otherwise Inspiration Kit. While the latter offers practical guidance for practitioners, policymakers and community builders, this book develops a deeper conceptual and analytical understanding of arrival infrastructuring.

Contributing authors: Shila Anaraki (KU Leuven & KASK, Ghent), Karel Arnaut (KU Leuven), Paschalis Arvanitidis (University of Thessaly), Luce Beeckmans (KU Leuven), Paolo Boccagni (University of Trento), Martina Bovo (Politecnico di Milano), Laura Guérin (Paris Nanterre University), Mary Hogan (KU Leuven), Tina Gudrun Jensen (Coexist, Denmark), Carolien Lubberhuizen (RadarAdvies, Amsterdam), Bruno Meeus (Utrecht University of Applied Sciences), Tamlyn Monson (Coventry University), Karen Fog Olwig (University of Copenhagen), George Papagiannitsis (University of Thessaly), Lucie Revilla (Institut des mondes africains), Dounia Salamé (KU Leuven), Marhabo Saparova (ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam), Cornelia Tippel (ILS - Research Institute for Regional and Urban Development, Dortmund), Charalampos Tsavdaroglou (University of Amsterdam and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

About the Author

Karel Arnaut is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven. He teaches and conducts research on migration and mobility in relation to language use, diversity and inequality.

Luce Beeckmans is Research Professor in Urbanism and Migration at the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, KU Leuven, and vice-director of the KU Leuven Urban Studies Institute (LUSI).

Bruno Meeus is Associate Professor at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. He teaches at the Institute for Social Work and coordinates research on housing precarity within the Centre for Social Innovation.