Women with a migration background in civil society engagement. Inclusion and participation work with refugees (FemPart)

A relevant proportion of volunteers in refugee work are themselves women with migration experience: according to a recent study, over 70% of volunteers working with refugees are female and just under 16% have migration experience. Until now, the engagement of migrants has mostly been neglected in the media, politically and academically.

The aim of the project was to formulate recommendations for internal organisational and political measures to improve the conditions for migrants' civil society engagement through qualitative interviews with migrants and experts.

As part of a project extension, the equality of women with a migration background in cooperation with refugees was also analysed in greater depth. In addition to the data already collected, further qualitative interviews were conducted with men with a migration background and women without a migration background who work with refugees. This new data illuminated the diversity aspects of gender and migration from an intersectionally informed perspective in this context. 

The second phase of the project focused on networking gender-sensitive migration research within the DeZIM research community. To this end, a workshop entitled "How gender-sensitive is migration research today?" was held at IMIS on 29.11.2019: "While migration research was long considered gender-blind, numerous contributions have emerged in recent decades that challenge the male bias of dominant research. However, despite this increased attention, a gender-sensitive perspective is still not a matter of course in the mainstream of migration research and there are also narrow perspectives and gaps within gender-related migration research. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers from the DeZIM research community who work on gender issues in order to exchange views on existing research and the current state of gender-related migration research."