Foci

Right now, there are three foci within the Laboratory:

1) Migration and border regime studies
This focal point’s research projects are interested in aspects of the European migration and border regime: its institutions, protagonists, discourses and practices. The projects have in common that they try to grasp and analyse current modifications of the migration and border regimes’ knowledge productions and policies. The concept of regime describes regulation as a more or less messy ensemble of practices and knowledge-power-complexes. Regulations are thus seen as products of negotiations between different protagonists, in which state and the movements of migration are not to be located on opposite sides. In our research projects we are aiming at deconstructing so perceived "large entities", like the European Union, and are coming back to anthropological research perspectives to do so. This means not only focusing on programmatic turns of regimes, but also on their subjectivizations, techniques and protagonists. "Regime" and "assemblage" are good cross-sectional perspectives to highlight negotiations, emergences, changes and genealogies. At the same time the regime perspective allows for a knowledge reflexive perspective that traces the genesis of categories like "migration" or "migrant" as well as their connections to other rationalities and subjectivizations. All in all we consider our research projects to be spotlights on the changes and transformations of the current migration and border regime. They open a punctual access to a permanent changing knowledge-power-network. read more...

2) Urban regimes of (post-)migration
The research projects within this focal point of our laboratory grasp the ambivalences of belonging and differential inclusion, the negotiations in institutions and networks of urban politics as well as the struggles of migration under these circumstances. We analyze techniques and strategies of urban governance and day-to-day practices in different (urban) political fields from the perspective of (post-)migration. This does not only mean, that we focus on the ambivalences of integration discourses and of migration related politics within cities. We also discuss the current fights of urban politics in general (for example the "right to the city"-movement) from the point of racism theory, in terms of social theory and from the perspective of migration. We understand urban politics and the practices of its different areas and fields to be a result of negotiations between different perspectives, practices and institutions of governance and of autonomous movements of migration. The notion of a regime conceptually summarizes these negotiations that consist of discourses, practices, norms and materialities in time and space and allows for all their disruptions, coincidences and synergies. read more...

3) Representations of migration
The ways migration is represented on Germany’s official stages are usually determined by a national perspective that again is referring to ideas and practices of national and colonial projects. This produced a relationship between the imagination of the nation state and its supposed "others" and reproduced again and again migration to be a problem, do be deviant and exotic whereas the national society was normal, stable, sedentary. Being based on a culture concept that fixes individuals to territory and focuses on group behaviour such contrasting images solidify and authorize social classifications and access to rights. Inspite of these images, the places, politics and contents of representation are contested and in transition. In the context of migratory claims, academic critique, neoliberal politics and tight budgets changes of identity, actors as well as narratives seem to be possible and history politics seem to open up for migration aspects. According to this latter development the research projects in this section trace the representations of migration from a critical analytic perspective with regard to the involved stakeholders, policies, spaces and effects. read more...