GRK 2987:  Mobility rights in the global context of multiple crises

• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology, Non-European Cultures, Jewish Studies and Religious Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516661009

Hardly any other issue of such global scale is so tightly interwoven with notions of “crisis” as migration. Besides the causal dimension, migration itself has been increasingly problematised as “crisis” – as occurring in tandem with the proclaimed “control crisis” playing out in the Western world in recent years. In this global context of multiple crises – as, for example, with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Covid-19 pandemic or climate change and its intensifying effects –, mobility rights in their given codified form of an “international migration law” complex are now increasingly being challenged. Taking this migration–crisis nexus as its starting point, the Research Training Group (RTG) will bring together 12 scholars from the Faculties of Philosophy, Social Sciences and Law respectively at the University of Göttingen. Based on their thematic and regional expertise 12 PhD projects per cohort study how mobility rights are currently formulated, contested and reshaped. The interdisciplinary exchange facilitates to focus on the co-constitutive character of law and society and to ask how human mobilities – be they internal or cross-border – are conceptualised, (un)regulated by law and how rights are practised, contested, claimed and hence develop over time The development of such a socio-legal approach, which transcends Legal and Migration Studies in the sense of an interdisciplinary dialog as part of the training of doctoral students, is unique in Germany. The RTG thus contributes to the establishment of a socio-legal approach in the country and a legal perspective in empirical migration research. It will allow outstanding young researchers to gain in-depth expertise in a relevant socio-political field in which analytical competence is already in great demand today from academia, think tanks, politics, non-governmental organisations and similar. With a good balance of individual supervision, compulsory courses on joint interdisciplinary concept work and optional courses for additional key qualifications or for personal career development, the doctoral researchers will be ideally accompanied as they learn how to conduct innovative research and qualify for an outstanding doctoral degree within four years. In addition, the doctoral researchers will benefit also from the contributions of and exchange with two associated high-ranking judges and renowned (international) scholars. The RTG will be embedded in a vibrant research environment of ongoing migration- / mobility-related projects with a broad range of thematic and regional foci. It will offer the best possible research and networking opportunities for a postdoctoral researcher to be a long-standing, approachable research companion to the doctoral researchers while conducting his/ her own research project as well as building up an academic profile at the juncture of the Social/Cultural Sciences and Law.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Sabine Hess
• Participating Researchers: Professor Dr. Alexander Baur; Privatdozent Dr. Peter Birke; Professorin Dr. Andrea Bogner; Professorin Dr. Christine Bratu; Professor Dr. Olaf Deinert; Professorin Dr. Friederike Faust; Professorin Dr. Elfriede Hermann; Professorin Dr. Anja Jetschke; Professor Dr. Alexander-Kenneth Nagel; Professorin Dr. Angela Schwerdtfeger; Professor Jörg Timo Weishaupt, Ph.D.