New Publication: Liebelt, C. (2026). The affective afterlife of the “smelly immigrant” trope: Contested scents, “race,” and olfactory contact zones in Berlin. City & Society, 38(3), e70040
What does belonging smell like – and how can smell become a means of social exclusion? In her new article in City&Society, our colleague Claudia Liebelt explores Berlin-Neukölln as an “olfactory contact zone”: an urban space in which scents, memories, bodies, and social boundaries intersect. She traces how historically rooted notions of the “smelly immigrant” – connected to antisemitism, colonialism, and later the racialization of migrant workers – continue to reverberate in the present.
News from Sep 29, 2026
At the heart of the article is the afterlife of racialized violence and olfactory othering. Even when explicitly derogatory tropes are no longer commonly voiced, their effects do not necessarily disappear: they may persist in bodily perceptions, memories, anxieties, and everyday practices of managing scent. At the same time, Liebelt shows how smells can also create belonging, well-being, and forms of resistance. Smell thus becomes a medium through which history continues to be sensed – but also contested and reworked.