Project information
Project manager
Emma Söderman, Senior Lecturer in Social Work.
Other project members
Anna Lundberg, Sociology of Law Department, Lund University
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University and Lund University
Financier
Forte
Timetable
1 jan 2026 – 31 dec 2028
Subject
Social Work and Migration (Department of Social Work, Faculty of Social Sciences)
Research group
Social work and migration
Knowledge environment
Migration encounters
More about the project
Economic austerity measures and an ongoing paradigm shift in migration policy are making life more difficult for people in precarious situations, such as people in homelessness and/or people residing as undocumented. With limited resources, civil society organisations are taking on greater responsibility for meeting needs, sometimes on their own, sometimes in collaboration with public institutions. In this context, we can speak of emerging alternative local infrastructures, i.e. development of material and social resources in marginalised sites where people voluntarily cooperate to meet needs and contribute to change. This project explores how such alternative city infrastructures emerge, are sustained and/or dismantled. By analysing how civil society actors mobilise and use and develop city infrastructures to address a lack of public commitments in combination with an exclusionary migration policy, the project will contribute with new insights into a welfare society in transition.
The research methodology is a longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork over three years, including observations and 50 qualitative interviews. The fieldwork covers initiatives, organisations and activities that try to counteract the lack of resources that characterises the current situation and risks making precarious lives even more precarious, and the alternative infrastructures that enable and develop these activities. The fieldwork is unique in its focus both on everyday work, such as legal advice, food distribution or shelters, as well as the ways in which the activities seek to increase the representation in the public sphere of people whose lives and experiences are
not usually recognised nor made visible. The project sets out from a theoretical assumption that just societies require both the redistribution of resources and the recognition of experiences and interests, as well as a questioning of how the boundaries around a society are drawn.
