"Exploring Experiences of Inequality in European Urban Centers: Towards an Intersectional and Transnational Approach."

What strategies do migrants living in European cities use to challenge inequalities in access to healthcare, participation in the labor market and the creation of social support networks? The papers in this panel aim to respond to this question by drawing from transnational and intersectional approaches conceptualizing inequalities as sets of relationships between people and broader structures in which interactions generate better opportunity for some more than for others (Tilly, 2000). Panel participants consider that these interactions and the benefits that can be obtained through migration are affected by various social categories such as gender, class, sexual identity, transnational connections, and citizenship. Intersectional approaches allow to examine how these axes of inequality (Crenshaw, 1989; Anthias, 2001) simultaneously affect migration outcomes and also how they operate differently according to the geographical space in which they develop: origin and host societies as well as transnationally. Nonetheless, the papers presented in this panel will also emphasize migrants’ agency to resist or conform to the inequalities they face. Overall, this panel aims to contribute to the study of migration and inequality at the conceptual and methodological levels. At the theoretical level, the panel will build on new debates on the reproduction of intersectional inequalities in transnational settings (Faist, 2016, Amelina, 2017). At the methodological level, all paper presenters have use multi-sited ethnographic methods (working in cities such as Madrid, London, Milan, Brussels and Frankfurt) and will therefore use the panel as an opportunity to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of such method.