Professor Suzanne Hall

Professor Suzanne Hall

Head of Department

Department of Sociology

Room No
OLD.3.11
Languages
English
Key Expertise
Urbanisation, Migration, Racialisation, Livelihoods, Ethnography

About me

Suzanne Hall is Professor of Sociology at LSE and Head of Department. Her work explores the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation. Suzi focuses on everyday claims to space and how political economies of displacement shape racial borders, migrant livelihoods, and urban multicultures. She is author of The Migrant’s Paradox (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and City Street and Citizen (Routledge, 2012). In 2025 she received the LSE Student Union award for ‘Outstanding Teacher of the Year’.

Suzi Hall, the migrants paradox Suzi Hall, City street and citizen  Suzi Hall, The Sage Handbook of the 21 city 

Expertise Details

Urbanisation; Migration; Racialisation; Livelihoods; Ethnography

Selected publications

Books

The Migrant’s Paradox: Street Livelihoods and Marginal Citizenship in Britain (2021) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hall, S., and Burdett, R. (eds) The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City (2017) London: Sage.

City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary (2012) London: Routledge.

Edited volumes

Guest Editor for ‘The Migrant’s Paradox Book Review Forum: Author to Author’ (2021) Society and Space, July.

Editor, Special Issue on ‘Migration and Election 2015’ (2015) Discover Society, Issue 17, February.

Hall, S., Dinardi, C. and Fernandez, M. (eds) Writing Cities (2010) A graduate student publication, London: London School of Economics and Political Science (in collaboration with the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design and Harvard Law School). 

Articles

Hall, S., Nyamnjoh, H. and L.R. Cirolia (2022) ‘Apportioned City: Gendered delineations of asylum, work and violence in Cape Town’Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 40(1) pp. 3-20.

Nyamnjoh, H., Hall, S., and Cirolia, L. (2022) ‘Precarity, Permits and Prayers: Working practices of Congolese women in Cape Town’ Africa Spectrum, 57(1) pp. 30-49.

Cirolia, L., Hall, S., and Nyamnjoh, H. (2022) ‘Remittance Micro-worlds and Migrant Infrastructure: Circulations, disruptions and the movement of money’Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47(1) pp. 63-76.

Georgiou, M., Hall, S. and Dajani, D. (2022) ‘Suspension: Disabling the City of Refuge?’Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48(9) pp. 2206-2222.

Hall, S. (2018) ‘Migrant Margins: The street life of discrimination’The Sociological Review, 66(5), pp.968-983.

Hall, S. (20170 ‘Mooring “Super-diversity” to a Brutal Migration Milieu’, commissioned for the 40th Anniversary Special Issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(9), pp. 1562-1573.

Hall, S., King, J. and Finlay, R. (2017) ‘Migrant Infrastructure: Transaction economies in Birmingham and Leicester, UK’Urban Studies, 54 (6), pp. 1311-1327. *Shortlisted for the Urban Studies Best Article Award.

Hall, S. and Savage, M. (2016) ‘Animating the Urban Vortex: New sociological urgencies’International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(1) pp. 82-95. 

Hall, S., King, J. and Finlay, R. (2015) ‘Envisioning Migration: Drawing the infrastructure of Stapleton Road, Bristol, New Diversities 17(2), pp. 59-72.

Hall, S. (2015) ‘Migrant Urbanisms: Ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Sociology, 49(3), pp. 853-869.

Hall, S. (2015) ‘Super-diverse Street: A ‘trans-ethnography’ across migrant localities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 22-37.

Hall, S. (2013) ‘The Politics of Belonging’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, vol. 20, issue 1,  Special Issue: Settling Differences in a Land of Strangers, pp. 46-53.

Hall, S. (2011) ‘High Street Adaptations: Ethnicity, independent retail practices and Localism in London’s urban margins’ Environment and Planning A, 43(11), pp. 2571-2588.

Hall, S. and Datta, A. (2010) The Translocal Street: Shop signs and local multiculture along the Walworth Road, south London’ in R. Tavernor (guest editor), Theme Issue on ‘London 2000 – 2010’, in City, Culture and Society, 1(2), pp. 69-77.

Hall, S. (2010) ‘Picturing Difference: Juxtaposition, collage and layering of a multi-ethnic street’, in Anthropology Matters, 12(1).
*Reprinted in Steven Vertovec (Editor) 2014, Migration and Diversity, Edward Elgar, London.     

Hall, S. (2009) ‘Being at Home: Space for belonging in a London caff’, in A. Datta (guest editor), Theme Issue on ‘Home, Migration and the City’, in Open House International, 34(3), pp. 81-87.
*Reprinted in Dick Hobbs (Editor) 2011, Ethnography in Context: The Urban Condition, vol. 1, London: SAGE.

Hall, S. (2008) ‘Narrating the City: Diverse spaces of urban change’, in M. Mitchell (guest editor), Theme Issue on ‘The Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources’, in Open House International, 33(2), pp. 10-17. 

Book chapters

Hall, S. (2024)  On  ‘AbdouMaliq Simone’, in Gilmartin, Mary, Hubbard, Phil, and Kitchin, Rob and Susan Roberts eds. Key Thinkers on Space and Place. Sage, 2024.Ch. 50., pp. 382-389.

Tayob, H. and S. Hall (2024) ‘The Partial Street: Gendering the everyday life of global precarity’, in Linda Peake, Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin and Anindita Datta (eds), International Handbook on Gender and Cities, Cheltenham: Elgar, Ch. 5., pp. 56-64.

Hall, S. (2022) ‘Edge Syntax: Vocabularies for violent times’, in Ash Amin and Michele Lancione (eds), Grammars of the Urban Ground , Durham NC: Duke University Press, Chapter 11, pp. 221-239.

Hall, S.(2018)  ‘Interior City’, in Ricky Burdett and Philipp Rode (eds), Shaping Cities in an Urban Age, London: Phaidon, pp. 120-127.

Hall, S., Finlay, R. and J. King (2017) ‘The Migrant Street’, in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett (eds), The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City, SAGE, pp. 464-477.

Hall, S and Burdett, R. (2017) ‘Urban Churn’, in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett (eds), The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City, SAGE, pp. 1-9.

Hall, S. (2017) ‘The Street is not a Square: Urban politics from the margins’, in Yvonne Franz and Christiane Hintermann (eds), Unravelling Complexities: Understanding Public Spaces, ISR-Forschungsbericht, Vienna, pp. 33-42.

Hall, S. (2015) ‘Designing Public Space in Austerity Britain’, in Juliet Odgers, Stephen Kite and Mhairi McVicar (eds), Economy and Architecture, Routledge, Oxon, pp. 226-236.

Hall, S. (2014) Emotion, Location and Urban Regeneration: The resonance of marginalised cosmopolitanism in Emma Jackson and Hannah Jones (eds.), Emotion and Location: Stories of cosmopolitan belonging, Routledge, London, pp.  31-43.

Hall, S. (2014) ‘Unrecognised Street: The social space of global change’, in Ryan Locke (ed.), Shifting from Objects to Places, Ax: Johnson Foundation, Stockholm, pp. 83-92.

Film and websites

Tayob, H., Hall, S. and Loewenson, T. (2020) Race, Space and Architecture. An open-access website

Hall, S. and Yetton, S. (2015) Ordinary Streets. A film. LSE Cities. 


 View a comprehensive list of Professor Hall's publications

Research

Suzi Hall is an urban ethnographer and has practised as an architect in South Africa. Her work connects the asymmetries of global migration and urban marginalisation, exploring the racialised frameworks of citizenship and economic inequality and their everyday contestations. She is recipient of an ESRC Future Research Leaders award (2015-2017) and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Sociology in 2017, and she gave the inaugural ‘Cities Annual Lecture’ at Birkbeck in 2022.

Suzi is part of the Urban Sociology research cluster.

Teaching and PhD supervision

Suzi teaches on the MSc City Design & Social Science programme on social and political formations of urban space, planning and design, and she convenes an undergraduate module on Racial Borderscapes.

Suzi welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD students in her area of research interests. Please note that she is not taking on new PhD students for the 2026-27 session.