Abstract
This introduction provides an overview of this Special Issue: ‘Night Stories: Urban Narratives of the Migrant Lives in Europe’, which originates from work undertaken within the collaborative HERA-funded research project ‘Night spaces: Migration, culture and integration in Europe’ (NITE). It argues that experiences and representations of the urban night are often overlooked in Humanities research. It contends that understandings of this overlooked dimension of the urban night can provide important and more nuanced insights into questions of migration. It surveys the collection of academic and artistic contributions to the Special Issue, which provides a transdisciplinary survey on the storytelling that emerges from diverse experiences of migration and their connections to the urban night.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3-10 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Crossings |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Apr 2022 |
Funding
The editors would like to acknowledge funding by Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA, grant no. 2.060) in developing this Special Issue. We also thank the support of the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study in Germany, an associate partner of NITE, at which the editors held fellowships that supported the development of the project as a whole and this Special Issue. We are grateful for the additional financial support from the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) that contributed to the costs of open access for the entire issue. This Special Issue on ‘Night Stories: Urban Narratives of Migrant Lives in Europe’ stems from work undertaken by the collaborative research project ‘Night spaces: Migration, culture and integration in Europe’ (NITE) (https:// www.nightspace.net/), funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) (2019–22). NITE’s interdisciplinary research engages with current debates on how cities are imagined and experienced and the critical role these dynamics have on communal well-being, as recognized in the UN Development Plan’s recent assessment of its 2016 New Urban Agenda (Xu and Tuts 2021). NITE proposes that an important, yet largely overlooked, dimension of urban life that needs to be taken into account more fully is the urban night and its relationship to migration. Bearing in mind the prominence and divisiveness of the question of migration in current social, political and cultural debates, we contend that a fuller understanding of how different migrant communities imagine, experience and narrate everyday life in cities ‘after hours’ can provide key insights into how to ensure more cohesive and resilient urban spaces for the future.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study | |
| Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society | |
| National Institute for Testing and Evaluation |
Keywords
- artistic activism
- diaspora
- migration
- nocturnal aesthetics
- nocturnal city
- public spaces
