Media of Production (Project Areas)

The joint research in SFB 1604 is organised along the three key media of the production of migration:  Figures,  Infrastructures and  Spaces. These are reflected in the project areas A, B and C. The development of a theory of the social production of migration is based on these production media.

Their processes are fundamentally open and never complete due to the dynamics and multiplicity of social practices, actors, relationships, situations, contexts and discourses involved. This fundamental openness is coupled with empirically observable closure in the sense of characteristic patterns, routines and path dependencies. In identifying negotiations that have an impact and create structures, we observe the formation or use of specific ›infrastructures‹ and the interlinking with specific ›figures‹ and ›spaces‹. Migration and its meaning are produced through these three – simultaneously enabling and restricing – key media. The production process and the transformation (or continuity) of societal migration relations are structured by the media, which are empirically intertwined and interacting with each other.

The work in each project area is coordinated by a postdoctoral researcher. Two project leaders form an interdisciplinary tandem responsible for developing the concept of each medium.

Figures of Migration represent forms of societal meaning-making and the production of difference. They are the result of knowledge-based social and psychological construction processes through which stereotypical representations of people, groups, and spatial movements emerge. These representations become semantically condensed, objectified, and ultimately serve as constitutive components in the negotiation of identities, (non-)belonging, and inequality. Societal engagement with migration is shaped by the prevailing ideas about ›migrants‹ and the ways in which these ideas are anchored on individual, discursive, and institutional levels. Figures of migration function as a lens through which actors observe migration and society, reducing complex processes and phenomena to accessible images and representations. Building on these premises, Project Area A investigates the (re)production and efficacy of various figures of migration and their role in shaping societal self-perceptions and external perceptions.

The five subprojects within this research area examine concrete constellations in which individual and collective patterns of perception, attitudes, and ascriptions are negotiated and become effective.

This occurs in two dimensions: First, the focus is on figuration — that is, how figures are produced and stabilized on individual, social, and institutional levels; how actors generate figures of migration through differentiation, typification, and the attribution of identity. Second, the project area investigates how these productions of difference shape the negotiation of migration and its meanings, and what consequences they entail for social inclusion and exclusion.

To address these questions, the subprojects focus on diverse societal domains and expressions of figures of migration. They examine practices and processes of (de-)migrantization, alongside shifts and differentiations over time. The contexts under investigation include individual perceptions, social movements, education and academia, the economy and labor market, as well as political and mass media discourses.

Creating or limiting options for mobility and belonging requires specific infrastructures and the apparatuses and actors associated with them. The focus of this cluster is on migration-related distinctions, categorisations and attributions of meaning, as well as on concrete decisions of (im)mobility or inclusion/exclusion, which are developed within the framework of complex constellations of structures and actors. The emphasis is not only on institutional and regulatory structures such as the law, but also on the (re)production and effectiveness of immaterial, technological, social and linguistic-communicative infrastructures.

The five projects in Project Area B examine, on the one hand, the infrastructures and operational logics of institutional and organisational actors (e.g. administrations, border protection organisations, recruitment agencies and NGOs) and, on the other hand, the interrelationship between the emergence and change of migration-related infrastructures and their impact on the practices and interactions of individual actors (e.g. migrant professionals). The focus is on the extent to which different types of (especially immaterial) infrastructures facilitate or impede access through mobility or belonging in the context of migration, and how the production of migration is negotiated through these different infrastructures.

Migration movements always have a spatial dimension. The production of migration always is related to a place, but also creates and uses spaces and concepts or imaginations of space. On the one hand, the double spatiality of the production of migration encompasses its specific spatial conditions. They are integrated into not only national, but also local and international contexts, ranging from specific places (e.g., border areas) to countries, transnational spaces, and world regions.

On the other hand, negotiations of migration and its meanings are characterised by spatialisation, spatial indexing and spatial ordering, i.e., by practices that ›position‹ people and their movements, and thus fulfil a classifying and structuring function. For example, ›arrival neighbourhoods‹ or border regions perform organising and structuring functions and are at the same time shaped and given meaning by the social production of migration.