Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging

What does it mean to belong in a place, or more than one place? This exciting new volume brings together work from cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholars researching home, migration and belonging, using their original research to argue for greater attention to how feeling and emotion is deeply embedded in social structures and power relations. Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging argues for a practical cosmopolitanism that recognises relations of power and struggle, and that struggles over place are often played out through emotional attachment. Taking the reader on a journey through research encounters spiralling out from the global city of London, through English suburbs and European cities to homes and lives in Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Mexico, the contributors show ways in which international and intercontinental migrations and connections criss-cross and constitute local places in each of their case studies. With a reflection on the practice of 'writing cities' from two leading urbanists and a focus throughout the volume on empirical work driving theoretical elaboration, this book will be essential reading for those interested in the politics of social science method, transnational urbanism, affective practices and new perspectives on power relations in neoliberal times. The international range of linked case studies presented here will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, urban studies, cultural studies and contemporary history, and for urban policy makers interested in innovative perspectives on social relations and urban form.

Asking what do emotions do to space and place, this book provides a unique journey in sensuous scholarship. One that offers novel perspectives on the power geometry of emotional attachments, made via objects, smells, affection, people and images. Travelling through Europe, Latin-America and the Caribbean, the authors show how sensations and sensoria move, capture, anchor and attach us to place in unexpected ways. - Professor Bev Skeggs, Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of LondonEmpirically and theoretically rich, this exciting collection critically weaves together explorations of mobility and belonging with understandings of emotion as personal, social and political. This gives us a series of novel and intriguing perspectives on the relationship between space and place, the ordinary and the exotic, local and cosmopolitan, near and far. Combining a range of disciplinary perspectives and urban case studies, Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging is a really important contribution to understandings of the contemporary urban experience. - Professor Gary Bridge, Centre for Urban and Public Policy Research, University of BristolScent of mango – tangle of weave. Fences (painted black with gold tips) and bridges (that look strangely like home). The pieces here represent some of the most original and engaging new scholarship in the emerging field of emotion and belonging. This is a collection that lets the reader catch glimpses of a range of cosmopolitan belongings, in the process extending and deepening our understanding of what urban communities can be. If you want to feel the emotional pull of place through the eyes of others, and in the process, think again about your own variegated experiences of belonging, read this book. - Gargi Bhattacharyya, University of East LondonWith Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging, Hannah Jones and Emma Jackson have produced the sort of text that a careful reader will return to endlessly. [It] brings together work from cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholars researching home, migration and belonging, using their original research to argue for greater attention to how feeling and emotion is deeply embedded in social structures and power relations. This collection of essays immerses the reader in the lives and voices of the fieldwork participants, and in doing so renders itself both a solid intellectual resource and a beautiful collection of insights into the emotional lives shaped by the cosmopolitan city... In short, this is a collection of essays which deserves to be read far more widely than urban studies; its methodological and theoretical richness is the kind that keeps on giving with every read. - Sarah Burton, The London School of Economics and Political Science Review of Books

Hannah Jones is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. She works on multiculture, belonging and inequality; policy making and public sociology; and critical and participative social research methods. Her first book, Negotiating Cohesion, Inequality and Change: Uncomfortable Positions in Local Government, won the 2014 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for best first sole-authored monograph in British sociology .Emma Jackson is an Urban Studies Journal Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, UK. She works on class, multiculture, homelessness and the relationship between everyday practices, mobility and place. She is currently writing a book on young homeless people and the city.