Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging ─ Emotion and Location

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.

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.