Sanctuary Cities and Social Movements

The Sanctuary Project was developed to study and support the practices, policies, and coalitions that are building and sustaining cities of sanctuary from the ground up, one neighborhood at a time. The history of sanctuary in law, theology, and practice can be traced at least as far back as 8thcentury BCE references to “sanctuary of refuge… not long after the first foundation of the city” in Plutarch’s Life of Romulus, and 7thcentury BCE references to “cities of refuge” in the biblical book of Deuteronomy.  The current sanctuary movement can be traced more directly to 1970s efforts to protect Vietnam War resisters in Berkeley, California, and to practices influenced by the Underground Railroad to support Central American asylum-seekers in the United States in the 1980s.  Since 2007, there has been a resurgence of sanctuary practices in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and the Netherlands, among others.  These practices resurrect, resignify, and syncretize long-forgotten political and cultural traditions of neighborhood-based social movements and policy discourses emphasizing the role of decentralized municipal and subnational state governments.

 As sanctuary practices, policies, and coalitions increasingly traverse/transgress nation-state borders, identity-group categories, and even the hegemonic liberal bifurcation of the public- private spheres, these emerging trends call for new methodologies, epistemologies, and ontologies to ground the fluid relationship between academic research, community-based action, and public policy.  The Sanctuary Project seeks to convert each of these hyphens into a liberated-zone-as-research-site, thereby cultivating roots and channeling flows between people, ideas, resources, and relationships among all those working in the transdisciplinary fields of sanctuary cities, sanctuary neighborhoods, and sanctuary movements.

We aim to enact this vision through four main practices:

 1.    Data Gathering/Archiving – Systematic gathering and archiving of qualitative and quantitative data that documents the efforts of individuals, groups, and institutions undertaking sanctuary work.  This includes raw and edited interviews, ethnographic observations, surveys, photographs, film, audio recordings, newspaper and magazine reports, first-person written accounts, and other artifacts.

2.    Data Analysis – Guided by the intellectual and political questions and concerns of scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers, archived data will be mapped, mined, and analyzed to interpret historical and sociocultural patterns and identify continuities, disjunctures, and gaps between existing research and current trajectories.

3.    Dissemination of Findings – Methods, materials, and findings will be shared through a range of platforms including in universities (eg. journal articles, academic conferences, research colloquia/workshops, course curricula), legal and policy forums (eg. legal briefs, white papers, candidate forums), community-based spaces and institutions (eg. workshops, trainings, dialogues, and participatory multimedia presentations and teach-ins at elementary and secondary schools, community centers, grassroots organizations, houses of worship, etc.), and digital media (eg. websites, audio/video podcasts, blogs, apps).

4.    Research and Action Partnerships –Through critical participatory action research and other methodologies grounded in feminist, critical race, and post-structural/post-colonial epistemologies, the Sanctuary Project seeks to deepen relationships and practices of liberation, decolonization, and mutual well-be(com)ing at the individual, interactional, and collective levels.  As central to this work, the Sanctuary Project prioritizes the cultivation of strong, sustainable, reciprocal bonds of trust with academic, neighborhood, and policy institutions in order to establish solid ground for existing and emerging sanctuary groups to develop, document, and share experiments, lessons, and capabilities that enhance the projects and spaces of sanctuary workers into an expansive web of cities of sanctuary for the third millennium CE.