Infrastructures of kindness in the context of migrant arrival

Thursday 20 November 2025, 3.45pm
Zoom and The Hub, Kellogg College

Susanne Wessendorf (University of Coventry)

This seminar is hybrid. Join us in person at The Hub, Kellogg College, or participate online via Zoom by registering here.

Much social scientific research on migrant arrival and settlement has examined these processes through the lens of ‘integration’, investigating how migrants access societal realms such as the labour market, education, civil society, and social networks. A complementary body of work has looked at how socio-economic contexts shape integration and social mobility. This paper expands on this work by highlighting the importance of place in the context of migrant arrival. It builds on an emerging body of literature on ‘arrival infrastructures’ that has emphasised that where migrants arrive, and the related place-based opportunity structures they encounter, play a crucial role in their ability to access resources. Arrival infrastructures consist of a range of places such as civil society organisations, religious sites, informal sites like barbers or cafés, as well as publicly funded places like libraries and support services.

Drawing on ethnographic research in East London, the paper analyses the opportunities and barriers that migrants encounter in accessing support through arrival infrastructures. It demonstrates how individual factors, such as cultural and social capital, combined with systemic barriers, including migration status and limited welfare entitlements, differentially shape access to support. It also highlights the crucial role of intermediaries or ‘brokers’, ranging from civil society actors to local pastors, shopkeepers and street-level bureaucrats, many of whom go beyond the remit of their everyday jobs. By drawing on the notion of ‘infrastructures of kindness’, the paper highlights how, in light of unprecedented cuts to welfare provision and their exacerbated effect in arrival areas (which are often amongst the most disadvantaged areas of the country), it is often thanks to these local acts of informal care that newcomers manage to forge a living.

COMPAS Seminar Series Michaelmas Term 2025

Theme: ‘Welcoming Cities: Arrival Infrastructure’

This seminar series is co-convened by the Global Exchange on Migration & Diversity, University of Oxford and DeZim, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

The seminars will be given at 3.45pm on Thursdays, online (Weeks 3-5); online and in The Hub, Kellogg College (Weeks 6-8).

What does it mean for a place to be welcoming? Cities in particular, as sites of migration and arrival, are often a focal point for integration, and in some cases are seen as places where national-level hostility to migration might be replaced by a welcoming approach, with some cities adopting proactive policies of sanctuary or welcome. If migration governance is understood predominantly as a national government competence, then welcoming is predominantly oriented at the local level. How do these levels of government interact, and how can we know this multi-level governance of migration and welcoming?

More broadly, how does this work function in practice? Should it be best considered through an integration lens, focusing on access to the labour market, education, and social networks, or through a more spatial approach, focusing on the role of arrival infrastructure in supporting newcomer communities through social infrastructure and the built environment (Wessendorf, 2024). Is the role of the state (at the national or local level) central, or should we instead focus on grassroots urban solidarity movements that have inspired new practices in urban citizenship (Humphris, 2025).

Cities are not homogeneous spaces and are not uniformly proactive in this space, facing different challenges and levels of demographic change. How do cities understand their role in welcoming, and how do Mayors and other actors define their leadership and convening roles?

This seminar series aims to tackle these questions of welcoming, arrival, integration and inclusion in cities – from both a municipal and civic perspective. The series is co-convened by the University of Oxford in the UK and Humboldt University in Germany, allowing for a comparative lens between two countries with contrasting approaches to integration and welcoming, as well as allowing for broader global perspectives.

Please download and share the seminar series poster: Welcoming Cities Arrival Infrastructure

Attendance is free, and all are welcome.