Dr. Reza Bayat

Reza Bayat is a research associate at the Center for Global Migration Studies (CeMig). He completed his PhD thesis at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology / European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen. His research interests include migration and ethnographic (border) regime research, health, trauma, narrative research, body and emotions.
In his PhD project titled “Trauma narratives, ruptured memories and politics of life: an ethnographic research of Iranian Refugees and asylum-seekers in Germany”, he addresses on the one hand the construction, propagation, and instrumentalizations of trauma, suffering, and victimhood narratives for the production, regulation, and administration of Iranian refugees as objects of trauma and controllable, racialized others. On the other hand, he focuses on the lives, narratives, and life-stories of groups of Iranian refugees in Germany in order to grasp and reflect their own narratives, which have been excluded from media and knowledge production as well as from the politics of care.

Currently, he is conducting a new research project with the title “Accessibility as politics of life: A multi-level analysis of migration-related and regime-building policies in the German health care system” as part of the research group „Public Health and migration from a global and interdisciplinary perspective“ at CeMig. In this project, he concentrates on migration and migration-related regime building policies in the German health care system from an institutional analytical perspective in order to investigate the role of policy-making and institutional formations in migrants’ accessibility to the health care system. This project examines the different ways the health care system and regime-building and bordering mechanisms in Germany go hand in hand and shape each other, while documenting and analyzing the ways migration histories and discourses inform and shape how “right to health” and “protection of life” are produced, defined, and implemented on various levels.


Research interests

• Migration and Ethnographic (Border) Regime Research
• Health
• Trauma
• Narrative Research
• Body and Emotions
• Anthropology of Policy