Kooperationsprojekt
der Northumbria University, UK und des ZZF Potsdam
Leitung: Daniel Laqua und Isabella Löhr (ZZF)
Finanzierung: DFG-AHRC
Förderzeitraum: Februar 2025 bis Januar 2028
This DFG-AHRC funded project connects student mobility to changing migration policies and discourses in Western Europe, covering the period from the 1960s to the 1980s. In doing so, it offers fresh insights into the development and transformation of selective migration regimes and the ways their target constituencies experienced them.
This project investigates the relationship between restrictive migration policies in Western Europe and schemes that facilitated the transnational mobility of students. Moreover, it shows how such mobility intersected with other forms of migration (such as flight, exile and labour migration) and considers the impact on students who often faced issues that shaped migrant experiences more broadly, from the navigation of visa bureaucracies to personal encounters with racism, xenophobia and discrimination. The project integrates Belgium, France, West Germany and the United Kingdom into one analytical framework, while also setting Western European developments in relation to comparable or contrasting mobilities to North America and to the state-socialist countries in Eastern Europe.
Drawing on sources from national archives, international institutions, universities and non-governmental organisations, the project combines comparative, international and transnational perspectives. By tracing the shifting policies towards, and experiences of, international students across three decades, the project connects phenomena that so far have been treated separately in the academic literature. Moreover, it shows how the politics of student mobility translated broader geopolitical constellations – such as Cold War politics, decolonisation and European integration – into mobility patterns in ways that have not yet been fully acknowledged. This collaborative project will result in a co-authored monograph, journal publications as well as knowledge exchange activities with present-day student organisations. As a whole, it makes a pioneering contribution to our understanding of migration regimes, the categorisations of mobility and the genealogy of migration discourses.