PhD project

The 1970s witnessed an intensification of social debates about flight and asylum in German-speaking Europe, and these contestations remain acute to this day. The increasing significance of flight and asylum in both the public and political spheres of the GDR, the ›old‹ Federal Republic and the unified Germany led to an increased social production and differentiation of flight-related figures, who are at the center of this project. The creation and usage of such figures as for example ›boat people‹, ›economic refugees‹ (…) by actors with different levels of power conveys specific ideas about the (il)legitimacy of (potential) migrations as well as the ›utility‹, ›danger‹, or (non-)affiliation of those who have fled.

To investigate these powerful constructions, we first carry out statistical analyses on a broad empirical basis of text corpora (including parliamentary minutes, newspaper articles, legal texts). After identifying particularly relevant figures, those will be then subjected to a historically contextualizing in-depth analysis in order to reconstruct the process of how figures are created and negotiated from a comparative perspective as well as in its specific national characteristics. As a result, new insights into historically and spatially differing migration and asylum regimes are expected.