A room of one’s own?

The aim of this paper is to trace how young refugees emplace themselves – affectively through their bodies – in the postmigration EUropean city. Setting out from Duff’s (2017) notion of an ‘affective right to the city’, we interpolate the concept with a postmigration perspective on affective emplacements in the urban. Empirically, we trace how in mundane interactions with urban spaces this affective right to the city can be articulated as everyday resistance to the postcolonial violence that dislocates young refugees’ embodied presence from the EUropean city. We draw attention to small acts of taking up space for one’s own with one’s own body in the urban public to rest, experience joy and imagining future becomings. Methodologically, we engage with the potential of ‘small stories’ told to us by young refugees during qualitative interviews and storymapping workshops in the city of Leipzig. Based on our empirical data, we argue that following the affective moments in these small stories allows us to develop a more nuanced understanding of how young refugees’ appropriate urban spaces as sites of mundane emplacement.