Migration and Diversity

Prof. Dr. Boris Nieswand

The chair "Migration and Diversity" team focuses on a reflexive and ethnographic approach to migration, diversity and urban coexistence.

By reflexivity we seek to understand social processes and orders of knowledge by which persons obtain their knowledge of migration, diversity and coexistence. This raises, for example, the following questions: what social circumstances lead to migration being understood primarily as a problem of integration, social inequality, or management, rather than something else? How do assessments of migrant groups and forms of migration come about? How do social sciences and state institutions contribute to producing knowledge about migration? 

Ethnography asks how things are done in everyday life and what the contexts in which people live their lives look like. It is less interested in how attributes are distributed in society or what general accounts people give about themselves, their identity or their attitudes. Ethnographic research is much more concerned with identifying the cultural knowledge and social orders that are produced and reproduced in practices, situations, and social relations.

The team co-organizes the interdisciplinary research network UnKUT – Undisciplined Knowledge at the University of Tübingen.

• How do threats affect social life in heterogeneous urban districts?
• How does the inclusion of forced migrants work in small towns and villages?
• What role do notions of morality play in the perception of social differences and inequality?
• How do people justify critique towards orders of migration and/or gender relations, and what consequences does this have on social life?