We welcome you in joining us for the launch of Suzi Hall’s new book, The Migrant’s Paradox: Street livelihoods and marginal citizenship in Britain.

Suzi’s book connects global migration with urban marginalization, exploring how “race” and cultural navigation map onto place across globe, state, and street. Suzi locates The Migrant's Paradox on streets in de-industrialized peripheries, where jobs are always hard to come by and the impacts of historic state underinvestment are sorely felt. Drawing on hundreds of in-person interviews with shop proprietors on streets in Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, London, and Manchester, she examines the brutal racial orders of sovereignty and capitalism in the formation of street livelihoods in the urban margins. Her six-year project incorporates the combined impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, austerity governance, and processes of state-sanctioned regeneration, all of which unfold in relation to a punitive bordering regime. In articulating “a citizenship of the edge” as an adaptive and audacious mode of belonging, she shows how nationalism and discrimination are maintained and refuted.

Meet our speakers and chair

Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London

Suzi Hall is Associate Professor of Sociology at LSE.

Ajmal Hussain is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick

Engin Isin is Professor in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London

David Madden is Associate Professor of Sociology at LSE.