Co-edited by Tatiana Thieme, Eszter Kovacs and Kavita Ramakrishnan, this website draws on multi-sited research conducted between May 2017 and July 2018 across four European Cities: Athens, Budapest, Berlin and Paris. Funded by the British Academy’s UK International Challenges Award, the project is called “Temporary migrants or new European citizens? Geographies of integration and response between ‘camps’ and the city”.

We include contributions from several of our research participants and collaborators, bringing together stories, voices, and reflections from the field that attempt to ‘think together’ and ‘think across’ the four field sites. This zine seeks to mark moments that shaped the back stories of refugee and migration politics throughout this past year, and aims to open up questions for future research, activism, and policy.

Eszter is interested in the challenges and opportunities facing civil society in Eastern Europe. Eszter’s work with refugees began with the manufactured ‘crisis’ at the Keleti (eastern) train station in Budapest in August 2015. She has an undergraduate degree in ecology and Masters in Environmental Law from the University of Sydney, with a PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge.

Kavita’s research has examined the lived experiences of slum eviction and resettlement, with a specific focus on livelihoods, housing and access to infrastructure. Though this work is primarily based in Delhi, the themes of housing and informality have shaped Kavita’s interests in contexts outside of the Global South, to understand how people survive on the ‘margins’ and their aspirations for the ‘good life’ elsewhere. In relation to this project, Kavita brings her understandings of home-making and community-building in precarious situations to bear on how refugees navigate the city. She has undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Southern California, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Cambridge, respectively; she received a PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge in 2015.

Tatiana is interested in precarious labour, the porosity of carceral spaces, concerns with social and economic marginality and practice of adaptation to uncertainty across the global North and South. Tatiana draws on her training in anthropology and human geography, and insights from 10 years of on-going research in Nairobi, Kenya studying urban youth culture, and the interface between local informal economies and the business and politics of urban development in low-income settlements where public services are largely absent and the role of social enterprise has become prominent. Between 2015-2017, Tatiana also pursued research on a prison wing in Brixton documenting offenders’ “last mile” in prison and first mile out. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge, an MSc in Law and Anthropology from LSE, and a BA in Dance and Anthropology from Cornell University.