Refugees' Docking Sites in Society. An Inclusion Theoretical Approach

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Armin Michael Nassehi; Dr. Irmhild Saake
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428452742

The research project that we plan to set up aims to find where the political debates about integration usually end: in social practice. We want to make empirically visible how refugees and asylum seekers arrive at different, specialized docking stations in society. Such docking sites are organizations that, as zones of dense communication, transform a specific attachment into compact chains of action. The underlying theory-based assumption is that refugees, like other persons, are included as addressees of social communications. To what extent the migrant is a special condition must be investigated empirically. The organizations we select are the theater, the workplace, the doctor's office, the school/training and the office.In the theater aesthetic communication is in the foreground, which could be a special emphasis on the "talking" refugee, who gains his status as a representative of a cultural exotic. The workplace or entrepreneurial communication is interested in refugees in the sense of an economic perspective and in this respect will also approach refugees with an interest in profit orientation. Schools and further education institutions are likely to encounter linguistic integration deficits and see them as a pedagogical challenge to address social inequality. The doctor's office provides a perspective that must reconcile medical specialization with interculturality and balance this in the conversation between doctor and patient. The Office, on the other hand, faces refugees as an organization of dense legal communication, which in this case has very fundamental consequences in so far as residence status is concerned.The project thus pursues the goal of (further) developing a category of "migrant inclusion" relevant to migration sociology. For the question of an appropriate sociology of the refugee crisis and the integration of refugees, the goal is to free the discourse from over-assumptions of an integrating society in order to arrive at more reasonable expectations of what to expect from whom and the conditions of inclusion of refugees. It is also crucial to shift the category of cultural difference first into the second series and instead to use the structural conditions of inclusion as the starting point, and then to see to what extent inclusion situations are or will not be concretized. It will be about collecting and comparing inclusion strategies, opportunities and conflicts. In the sense of Pierre Bourdieu interpretation patterns, practices and power constellations should also be understood as "local effects".

• DFG Programme: Research Grants