Translocality and Translocal Subjectivities: a Research Overview Across the fields of Migration, Culture and Urban Studies

A point of departure in this report unfolding in the intersection of migration and urbanity, is therefore the notion of ‘culture’ and that of the ‘cultural subject’. Why is culture relevant in relation to migration? What does the notion of culture bring to the current urban sustainability debate? Where and how is culture localized in relation to urbanity? Who gets to be the ‘cultural subject’ in passive or active sense, and where is this subject located? Spatially ambiguous and temporally evasive, the concept of ‘culture’ is today contested and largely suspended between extremes, such as the inclusive and exclusive, the rooted and the uprooted, the homogeneous and the diverse, and perhaps most frequently, the local and the global, hence sharing many of the tensions characterizing urban space; tensions often elusively implied in urban sustainable development debate in terms such as “urban diversity”, “parallel society”, “arenas for integration”, “participation”, “tolerance”, and “meetings across lines”, just to mention a few expressions surfacing in current urban discourse and policy work