Infrastructures of Urban Migrant Citizenship, Slow Emergencies and Covid-19

Covid-19 pandemic has had widely differential impacts on different populations around the globe, including diverse migrant populations. In Denmark it had been in particular those without an official registration number - albeit not necessarily without a legal basis to reside - that have been most severely impacted. Often precariously housed or homeless, they rely on non-profit organizations and charities to access basic resources or substantiate their latent rights. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with such migrant service providers in Copenhagen, conducted in fall 2021, we analyze the impacts of the pandemic on their work. We approach our analysis through a concept of citizenship, understood here as a socio-political relation between the subject and the political community with the shape and extent of rights, resources and recognition at its core, regardless of subject’s formal legal status. These informally networked, city-reliant migrant service providers are then a crucial component of an infrastructure of citizenship. Our analysis highlights an uneven landscape of impacts from ‘crisis management’ irretrievably derailing long-term programming to a provision of openings - some more tentative than others - to novel practices, tactics and collaborations. Throughout we pay attention especially to these providers’ interfacing with the municipality, stressing their complex navigations of formal-informal boundaries in what is otherwise a heavily formalized and state-regulated system of care. Theoretically we draw on the recent work on slow emergencies (Anderson et al 2020; Grove et al 2021) to make sense of these navigations for the (post)pandemic urban migrant citizenship.