European cities and civil societies have been since 2015 remarkably active in promoting solidarity-based local citizenship for migrants and refugees regardless of those nationality and legal status of residence. Up today, both, projects of solidarity-based local citizenship as well as theoretical approaches to this have been elaborated with regard to urban centres whereas rural regions have hardly, if at all, been considered. In how far is this discursive marginal position of rural regions due to a broad societal marginalisation? What specific potentials and limits do transformative concepts of solidarity-based local citizenship feature in rural regions? Sevasti Trubeta addressed these questions using the empirical examples of civil solidarity with refugees and migrants in the rural region Altmark in German federative state Saxony-Anhalt.
Sevasti Trubeta is a sociologist and Professor of Childhood and Migration at the University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal. From 2009 to 2015 she was professor for Sociology of Migration and Globalisation at the University of the Aegean (Lesvos, Greece) and from 2015 to 2017 a visiting professor at the Free University Berlin. Prior to these appointments she had research positions at the Free University Berlin and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau. She has been a visiting researcher and fellow at various universities including Princeton University (2003) and Kosmos-Excellence Initiative, Humboldt Universität Berlin (2015). The focus of her research addresses the fields of civil society, borders, migration, refugees and minorities (especially Roma), eugenics, medicalisation and racism. Her latest books are Physical Anthropology, Race and Eugenics in Greece, 1880s–1970s (Brill Academic Publishers, 2013), and (co-editor with C. Promitzer and P. Weindling) Medicalising Borders: Selection, containment and quarantine since 1800 (Manchester University Press, 2021).
IWM Permanent Fellow Ayşe Çağlar introduced the speaker and moderated the colloquium's discussion.
