Migration and labour are not simply joined when workers move into existing jobs. Migrant labour is continuously made — evaluated, interpreted and positioned — through practices of differentiation that sort people by skill, suitability, origin, gender, language and presumed work capacity. This workshop brings the labour-related subprojects of SFB 1604 onto one question: how do such evaluations operate across the three media through which migration is produced — figures, infrastructures and spaces?
The contributions trace this across concrete settings. Figures of the migrant worker — from “modern slavery” in long-haul trucking to othering in post-migrant organisations — classify and hierarchise labour. Infrastructures of recruitment and knowledge — care-worker training in India, the epistemic power shaping migrants’ world-making, the employability reasoning of post-2022 Russian migrants — position workers before and during mobility. Spaces and languages of skilled migration — multilingual hospitals, the recognition of migrant physicians — govern who counts as competent, and where. Reading figures, infrastructures and spaces together, the workshop asks how evaluation and differentiation produce migrant labour and its inequalities — and seeks answers across the projects that may lead to a possible joint output.
Programme
1) Recruitment / Migration Infrastructures / Structural Violence
- Homaira Rahnoma (SFB 1604, Project B3), Tanja Fendel (Institute for Employment Research (IAB)): Recruiting Indian skilled workers for the German care sector: on care training and employment in India, as well as migration to and integration into the German labour market
- Lekh Nath Paudel (SFB 1604, Project B3), Philipp Jung (IMIS, Osnabrück University), Julia Stier (WZB Berlin Social Science Center): “I had to leave”: rethinking epistemic power to make sense of structural economic violence in migrants’ world-making
- Christa Wichterich (Bonn): Comment
2) Figures / Othering / Fragmented Labour
- Hajo Holst (SFB 1604, Project A4): Othering in post-migrant organizations – capitalism, unskilled labor and figures of migrant workers
- Daniel Heinz (SFB 1604, Project A4): “That’s modern slavery”: figures of migrant labour and the production of difference in German long-haul trucking
Guest Input / Comparative Perspective
- Mark Simon (Bielefeld University, RTG 2951: Cross-Border Labour Markets): Between calculation and judgment: how post-2022 Russian migrants make sense of their employability
3) Skilled Migration / Language / Workplace Interaction
- Christine Dimroth & Nantke Pecht (SFB 1604, Project B5): Public image and actual workplace interactions of migrant nursing professionals
- Christine Lang & Viktor van Versendaal (SFB 1604, Project C3): Negotiating a fragile fit: migrant physicians and the multi-contextual production of skills
Final Discussion / Next Steps
