Katharyne W Mitchell

About

Katharyne Mitchell is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current research focuses on the history and physical environment of spaces of containment, including forced labor camps, asylum holding centers, and deportation facilities. This work is funded through an Alexander von Humboldt research award. In recent work, she has explored the role of faith-based organizations in providing humanitarian aid and refuge to migrants. Her investigations include the transnational networking employed by church groups to protect asylum claimants, the policy impacts of church-based activism, and the shifting meanings and practices of sanctuary. She is based in the Department of Sociology at UCSC, located in Rachel Carson College.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Epistemology
• Political economy
• Art
• Development economics
• Economics
• Virology

Selected publications

• Hamburg's Spaces of Danger: Race, Violence and Memory in a Contemporary Global City

  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research · 2019-08-04 · 34 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Germany today is experiencing the strongest upsurge of right‐wing populism since the second world war, most notably with the rise of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland. Yet wealthy global cities like Hamburg continue to present themselves as the gatekeepers of liberal progress and cosmopolitan openness. This article argues that Hamburg's urban boosterism relies on, while simultaneously obscuring, the same structures of racial violence that embolden reactionary movements. Drawing on…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Covid-19 discloses unequal geographies

  Fennia · 2020 · 14 citations

  The collective editorial discusses inequalities that scholars in Europe and the Americas world have paid attention to during 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic has unevenly and unpredictably impacted on societies. The critical reflections reveal that the continuing ramifications of the pandemic can only be understood in place; like other large-scale phenomena, this exceptional global crisis concretizes very differently in distinct national, regional and local contexts. The pandemic intertwines with…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Migration, memory, and the insurgent temporalities of sanctuary

  Geografiska Annaler Series B Human Geography · 2022 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Over the past decade, there has been a renewed interest in time within human geography. This temporal ‘return’ is especially pronounced in areas of migration research, where current scholarship examines the ways that asylum seekers are forced into racialized spaces of waiting and uncertainty. There has been less attention to the temporalities of resistance, the multiple ways that migrants and migrant activists disrupt the temporal frameworks of migration governance. In this paper I explore the w…

  PublisherDOI

• Sanctuary Space, Racialized Violence, and Memories of Resistance

  Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2022 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Sanctuary, which comes from the Latin sanctus, meaning “holy,” has played a strategic role in political resistance for hundreds of years. Today the concept has returned as one of importance in the protection of refugees worldwide. In this article, which focuses on sanctuary practices in Germany, we examine the importance of the spaces of church-based asylum—the structure, physical spaces, and neighborhood of the church itself. We investigate the ways in which these spaces are constitutive of col…

  PublisherDOI

• A Conjunctural Mapping of People’s Park

  Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2024-01-19 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Following calls to spatialize conjunctures, this article proposes and practices conjunctural mapping through a case study of the ongoing struggle at People's Park in Berkeley, California.Although the method of conjunctural analysis enables and requires an investigation into the multiple forces at work in the production of hegemony, such analyses tend to focus on cultural, economic, political, and social (or horizontal) dimensions of winning or contesting consent, without necessarily locating the…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sarah Elwood

  13 shared

• Sallie A. Marston

  8 shared

• Key MacFarlane

  7 shared

• Cindi Katz

  The Graduate Center, CUNY

  7 shared

• Marie‐Claude Boily

  Imperial College London

  5 shared

• David Ley

  University of British Columbia

  5 shared

• Allan Pred

  4 shared

• Dan Hiebert

  University of California, Berkeley

  4 shared

Awards & honors

• Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award (2023-25)
• Sigma Xi, Scientific Research Honor Society (2024)
• Max Planck Institute Distinguished Fellowship, Göttingen, Ge…
• Brocher Foundation Fellowship, Geneva, Switzerland (2019)
• Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence Fellow (2014-2019)

Similar researchers at University of California, Santa Cruz

• Michael A. McCarthyh-42
• Jennifer E Reardonh-17
• Hillary L Angeloh-14