Seminar Cities are back in town, Thursday 11 February 2021, 5.30 – 7.15 pm CET, Sciences Po, Webinar
The term “sanctuary city” denotes a variety of practices whereby counties or cities in the United States of America protect irregular migrants from attempts by the federal government to detain and possibly deport them. These protections can be defensive (e.g. withholding information from federal agencies) or proactive (e.g. providing irregular migrants with all the privileges of residency irrespective of citizenship status). Academic literatures have mostly looked into the relationship between sanctuary cities and political activism and continuities between 1970s sanctuary church activism and contemporary sanctuary cities. However, J. Matthew Hoye argues that such approaches obscure more than they reveal about this complex phenomenon. In his talk, Hoye will mend remarks from previous works and offer an analysis of sanctuary cities using republicanism. Reconstructing American migration politics from the colonial era onward shows that sanctuary cities have roots in both the colonial republican revolt and the republican principle of freedom as nondomination. Our presenter will spell out the political stakes of sanctuary cities and offer to analyze this contemporary urban phenomenon through the lens of political theory.
Speaker: J. Matthew Hoye, Associate Professor of Global Justice, Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University
Connecting political theory, philosophy and sociology, J. Matthew Hoye’s research notably focuses on the political stakes of sanctuary cities. He has also worked on Hobbes’s legal philosophy and developed a neorepublican analysis of issues of global surveillance. He has notably published articles in Politics & Society, the European Journal of Political Theory and The Review of Politics.
Discussion: Benjamin Boudou, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Ethics, Law and Politics, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
For more information: citiesarebackintown@sciencespo.fr