CRC 1604: Production of Migration

Basic data for this project

Description

The Collaborative Research Center (SFB) aims to change the way we look at migration. It assumes that migration is the product of a societal production process, which in turn fundamentally changes societies. Using concrete empirical constellations, the SFB investigates how individual, collective and institutional actors in different contexts practice, process and charge migration with meaning. This production of migration is understood as a dynamic negotiation: In a contested process marked by power asymmetries, migration is (de)thematized, (de)problematized, and linked to other societal developments. By this, the production of migration not only creates, stabilizes or changes physical movements of people, but also social orders and knowledge systems. The shared research questions of the interdisciplinary consortium are: 1) How and with which meanings is migration produced? Who is involved in which ways and with which interests, resources, instruments and practices? 2) How and why does the societal approach to migration change? 3) How does the production of migration influence perceptions? And what consequences does it have for social structures and processes of societal change? The production of migration and its meanings is based on categorizations of people, groups and practices. These are condensed into social figures, which in turn can influence processes of negotiation. Project Group A of the SFB is therefore dedicated to the figures of migration and their emergence, reproduction and effectiveness - both on individual and societal levels. The production of migration also requires specific infrastructures that create or restrict options for mobility and belonging. These infrastructures and the actors associated with them are the subject of Project Group B. Moreover, migratory movements always have a spatial dimension. The production of migration, too, creates and uses spaces and spatial imaginations. Project Group C therefore focuses on the spaces of migration. In the SFB, figures, infrastructures and spaces are understood as central media of the production of migration. By examining how migration is conceived, observed and attributed with meaning, and how in this process societal structures of migration are (re-)produced, the SFB conducts migration research as research of the society as a whole. Research and academia are involved in the production of migration, too, and they thus also become an object of study. The long-term goal of the Collaborative Research Centre is therefore to develop a reflexive theory of the social production of migration.