Blog post by Andrea Calabretta, University of Padua, Italy; Francesco Della Puppa, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy; and Giulia Storato, University of Padua, Italy
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‘It is this fact of locomotion, as I have said, that defines the very nature of society’: this is what sociologist Robert Park[1] said exactly a century ago, seeing mobility as the characteristic and founding feature of humanity. It is no coincidence that the book in which he makes these considerations is titled ‘the City’ and brings together a set of essays on urban life. If people move naturally, at some point they also need to come to the – provisional – end of their journeys. To stop, at least for a moment, and to take root.
 
How then do migrants settle in cities and territories that are already inhabited? How do they develop relationships with the previous inhabitants? And with the future migrants, who will arrive after them?

​These questions have permeated the sociology of migration and urban sociology for over a hundred years. Our Identities article, ‘The migratory crossroads of Alte Ceccato: an emblematic case of migratory stratification’, attempts to analyze these questions from a new perspective. While migration studies have kept the ‘camera’ fixed on migrants and their complex movements, we focus on a specific place – the hamlet of Alte Ceccato in Italy – in order to observe the stratification and interaction between different ages of migration.

Blog post by Juliette Galonnier, Sciences Po Center for International Studies, France
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In July 2023, the alarming rise of public burnings of the Qur’an that occurred in several European countries, notably Sweden and Denmark, led the Human Rights Council of the United Nations to adopt a resolution on ‘countering religious hatred’. In hundreds of incidents, far-right or anti-Islam activists and politicians, sometimes under heavy police protection, had burned copies of the Holy Book in front of mosques or embassies of Muslim-majority countries.
 
These events garnered considerable international attention and received a number of responses (the Danish parliament subsequently adopted, in December 2023, a law that prohibits the ‘inappropriate treatment of writings with significant religious importance for a recognized religious community’). At the Human Rights Council, while incidents of Qur’an burning were unanimously condemned as despicable and wrong, there was no consensus as to how to characterize these events.