IN-PERSON London. Section A

Abstract

Abstract: In critical discussions of integration practices in multilevel urban governance, recent scholarship interrogates grassroots migrant/refugee-led organizations vis-a-vis professionalized immigrant-serving organizations as institutions. Whereas the latter, as street-level bureaucracies, are constrained by policies, funding and the political sphere, migrant/refugee-led organizations enact resistances and affordances at the most local levels of urban governance. This paper contributes to this line of scholarship by way of a materialist lens, honing in on the relevance of space, infrastructure and relationality in analyses of integration practices. Analysis draws upon multiple sources of data from the United States and Canada: participant observation, focus groups and interviews with organization leaders, service providers and language educators; interviews and surveys with immigrants; and an environmental scan of institutions serving immigrants. This paper argues that organizations’ occupying of physical space, use of digital tools and deployment of privatized resources are bound to their visibility as an institution and to the actuality of their integration practices. Borrowed office space, WhatsApp group chats, a migrant’s garage and a refugee’s grocery store, for instance, emerge as salient in examining integration practices. The material is examined not merely with tangible qualities, but also with symbolic capacities. That is, the physical spaces, digital tools and resources of RLOs yield meaning—affordances and limitations—that are crucial for their work. Thus, in their grassroots endeavors of disrupting dominant integration practices in multilevel urban governance, not only the symbolic legitimacy but also the institutional materiality of migrant/refugee-led organizations go hand-in-hand and are mutually accountable.