Partizipationsräume und Migrationsbiographien zugewanderter Roma/Romnja in Wien

In den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten hat sich die Zuwanderung von Roma/Romnja nach Wien aus dem südöstlichen Europa immer stärker diversifiziert. Schätzungen zufolge leben etwa 100.000 Roma/Romnja in Wien, von denen der Anteil zugewanderter Personen die Mehrheit darstellt. Zugewanderte Roma/Romnja gelten im politischen und wissenschaftlichen Diskurs als „neue Minderheiten“, die sich immer wieder mit negativen Zuschreibungen, sowohl in der Politik als auch in der öffentlichen Meinung, konfrontiert sehen und mit spezifischen Formen von Diskriminierung und Ausgrenzung zu kämpfen haben, die sowohl antiziganistisch als auch gegen Migrant_innen gerichtet sind. Diese Umstände erschweren die Integration in lokale Gemeinschaften weiter. Nicht zuletzt bilden zugewanderte Roma/Romnja eine äußerst heterogene Gruppe, die aufgrund verschiedener nationaler und religiöser Zugehörigkeiten, sowie diverser sprachlicher und kultureller Hintergründe aber auch aufgrund interner Differenzen in Hinblick auf Alter, Geschlecht und sozioökonomische Unterschiede multiple Herausforderungen und Bedürfnisse hat.

Während die politische Mobilisierung und Selbstvertretung autochthoner Roma/Romnja für Wien und Österreich gut dokumentiert ist, stellen Partizipationsräume sowie die individuellen Migrationsbiographien und postmigrantischen Erfahrungen zugewanderter Roma/Romnja bis dato eine Lücke in der Forschungslandschaft dar. Das Projekt will diese Lücke schließen, indem die Lebenswelten und Positionierungen, die damit verbundenen Aushandlungsprozesse zugewanderter Roma/Romnja sowie die daraus entstehenden Zugehörigkeitskonstruktionen und Möglichkeiten, am politischen und öffentlichen Leben in Wien teilzunehmen, eingehender analysiert und verstanden werden.

FEDCIT - Federal state against cities: Immigrant incorporation in the context of new immigrant reception

The unprecedented number of newcomers in the past year provides an immense challenge to federal state and local authorities, who have to co-ordinate the provision of policies and funds for incorporating immigrants into society. This comparative study seeks to understand the role of federal states for the incorporation of immigrants in the context of the recent influx of asylum seekers in Germany and Austria in 2015.

Few studies have so far investigated the role of federal states in immigrant incorporation and no research has yet been carried out on the character of federal state immigrant incorporation policies that captures institutional structures, officials and immigrant spokespersons’ agency as well as the role of power in the design and implementation of these policies. By bringing together debates on multi-level governance as well as cities as scale the research advances our concepts of the governance of immigrant incorporation in a globalised and interconnected world.

Using mixed methods, the project applies an institutional ethnography of federal state ministries responsible for immigrant incorporation that allows tracing internal processes of policy development and observing interactions between the involved institutions and actors. The yielded thick description is combined with economic data as well as interview data and policy documents.

By deploying a comparative research design that consists of case studies in four federal states (Baden Württemberg and Saxony, Upper Austria and Burgenland), two of which are located in Germany and two in Austria, the project identifies the impact of different factors on federal states’ immigrant incorporation policies, namely the national level’s stance towards immigration, the regions’ economic positionality, and local actors’ active lobbying on the federal state level.

Living right: an anthropological study of far-right activism

This project seeks to investigate new forms of civic engagement pursued by far-right movements and to understand their increasing appeal among “ordinary,” socially established citizens. Instead of studying extreme right political parties or subcultures, the predominant topics in current scholarship, I will look closely at day-to-day activism, using hitherto neglected anthropological methodologies that offer unique insights into the motivations for involvement and the relations between ideas, beliefs and practices. Focusing on far-right groups acting within and between several European countries, the project will investigate the processes of translation between locally grounded and transnational far-right practices and ideologies and the tensions produced as they try to orient themselves around both transnational and local concerns.

Combining participant observation with life stories interviews and a study in the history of ideas, the project aims to explore moral claims and lived experiences of present-day far-right activists. In so doing, it calls into question well-established categorizations (West/East, moral/immoral), emphasizes the importance of emic understandings and motivations of far-right actors, and investigates the different facets of far-right organizations, which, contrary to the common label “hate groups,” increasingly put forward “humanitarian” claims and “positive” visions (of community, society, the future). It aims to bring greater clarity to political discussions within Europe by problematizing a simplistic right-left binary that obscures the nuances of different and overlapping political positions. In addition to making a critical methodological and theoretical contribution to the study of a resurgent European far right, this project will also engage with a set of more enduring issues—the shifting understanding of social solidarity and reciprocity, different means of civic engagement, and the place of morality in politics.

REFUGEeICT – Multi-local Care and the Use of Information and Communication Technologies Among Refugees

Since the Arab Spring in 2010 and the subsequent crises and wars, many people from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have sought refuge in Austria, with a peak in 2015. By accepting around 89,000 asylum seekers in 2015, Austria became the fourth most important host country in the European Union. Prevailing political discourses and media representations depicting the refugee both as a problem and as a suffering subject accompanied their reception, thereby reducing and restricting them to the roles of “the other” and of “care recipients”. The various care relations refugees foster, including their role as active “care providers,” have generally been left out of focus.

The REFUGEeICT project addresses the urgent need to study the life worlds of recently arrived asylum seekers and refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq in Vienna by investigating the responsibilities and care relations they maintain in this specific urban context and in view of wider national and supra-national refugee policies. In particular this study explores the Internet in connection with the mobile phone and how these new communication technologies are adopted to maintain care relations across distances but also to meet care responsibilities in the new country of residence.

The two central questions of this study are: How can we understand the manifold care relations refugees are involved in? And what are the specific meanings of as well as practices and strategies involving new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as “media of care”? The study will explore refugees’ interpersonal (kin) care relations as well as refugees’ interactions with the state and non-governmental institutions that provide social services and how these realms influence each other. Moreover, it will give detailed insights into the specific role new ICTs play in these care relations.

Translating Socio-Cultural Anthropology into Education (TRANSCA)

TRANSCA is a project that will state what social anthropology can do for education as a sustainable response of the European educational sphere to on-going and new societal challenges such as diversity, immigration, socio-economic disparities and exclusionary politic.

TRANSCA is a strategic partnership with the goal of  further developing the cooperation between teacher education and socio-cultural anthropology in order to address the crucial issue of social inclusion in schools by implementing e.g. tools for self-reflexivity and hierarchical positionality.

TRANSCA aims to promote, and in some countries initiate, the process of transferring relevant aspects of socio-cultural anthropological knowledge into teacher education in Europe by building on existing approaches and experiences and adding new and innovative didactic assessments and practices with regard to core societal issues and social science concepts (such as interculturality, diversity, migration, integration, gender, intersectionality etc.).

Nunataryuk

Die meisten menschlichen Aktivitäten in der Arktis finden entlang den Küsten mit Permafrostböden statt. Diese Küsten sind zu einem der dynamischsten Ökosystemen der Erde geworden. Durch das Auftauen des Permafrosts sind diese Küsten einem raschen Wandel ausgesetzt. Die Veränderungen bedrohen die reiche Biodiversität, üben Druck auf die Gesellschaft aus und tragen zur Verletztbarkeit des globalen Klimasystems bei. NUNATARYUK ist ein Horizon2020-Projekt, das darauf abzielt, die Auswirkungen des Auftauens von Küsten- und Unterwasser-Permafrost auf das globale Klima zu ermitteln und zielgerichtete und mitgestaltete Anpassungs- und Mitigationsstrategien für die arktische Küstenpopulation zu entwickeln. Das Projekt bringt ForscherInnen verschiedener Disziplinen zusammen und die Universität ist eine von 26 im Projekt involvierten Partnerinstitutionen. ForscherInnen des Instituts für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie sind an den Arbeitspaketen 9: Adaptation and Mitigation (Anpassung und Minderung) [nunataryuk.org/science/work-packages/wp9-adaptation-and-mitigation] und 7: Natural Resources, Economy and Coastal Community Planning (Naturressourcen, Wirtschaft und Gemeindeplanung) [https://www.nunataryuk.org/science/work-packages/wp7-natural-resources-economy-and-coastal-community-planning] beteiligt. Arbeitspaket 9 untersucht Anpassungs- und Minderungsstrategien in Bezug auf die Auswirkungen des Klimawandel und des auftauenden Permafrosts und zielt in einem zweiten Schritt darauf ab, das in anderen Arbeitspaketen zusammengetragene Wissen zu integrieren, um die Entwicklung von Anpassungs- und Minderungsstrategien zu unterstützen. WP 7 zielt darauf ab, neue Datensätze über den sozioökonomischen Status arktischrn Küstenzonen zu erstellen, einschließlich neuer Möglichkeiten im Zusammenhang mit dem Klimawandel, und um einen Rahmen für Ressourcenmanagement im Kontext von tauendem Permafrost zu entwickeln. Feldforschung wird in Kanada, Svalbard, Grönland und Russland durchgeführt.

Configurations of “remoteness” (CoRe) - Entanglements of Humans and Transportation Infrastructure in the Baykal-Amur Mainline (BAM) Region

The Arctic and Subarctic have gained a surprising amount of attention in recent years. What used to be the ‘remote’ backwaters of global economic and political currents has morphed into a new frontier of geopolitics, resource extraction, and developmental designs. New transportation infrastructure often plays a critical role in the transformation of ‘remoteness’. The effects of new transportation infrastructures – accessibility, the shrinking of social and physical distance, the increased speed of connection – are not uncontested. On the one hand, those for whom ‘remoteness’ has been an asset, are often among the opponents of such developments. New transportation infrastructures are often not built to make the lives of local residents easier but to move cargo from point A to point B. Thus, there are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of such infrastructural developments.

Ethnographische Datenarchivierung

Forschung in der Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie findet meist im engen persönlichen Kontakt mit den Beforschten statt. Die eigene Person und die eigene Biografie sind immer Teil dieses Prozesses. Ethnographische Forschung stellt hohe Ansprüche an methodische Kenntnisse, aber auch an Reziprozität, Reflexivität und Ethik. Aus diesen Gründen bringen die Archivierung und Nachnutzung von ethnographischen Daten große Herausforderungen pragmatischer, ethischer und rechtlicher Art mit sich – Herausforderungen, denen sich das Pilotprojekt stellt, um eine an die Eigenarten ethnographischer Forschung angepassten Archivierungsstrategie zu entwickeln.