| Description |
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 led to an expansion in the social production of flight-related figures, who are at the center of this project. The creation and usage of such figures communicates ideas about the (il)legitimacy of (potential) migrations as well as the ’utility,’ ‘danger,’ or (non-)affiliation of those who are on the move. The older figure of the ‘refugee’ – a figure that tends to have positive connotations – was encumbered with new and mostly negative meanings, and thereby made to appear different. Various figures emerged from these negotiations, such as ‘asylum seekers,’ ‘unaccompanied minors,’ ‘boat refugees,’ 'tolerated persons', 'refugees', 'vulnerable refugee women', 'economic migrants' or 'illegal migrants'.
This project assumes that historical figures and categories are constructed and they become relevant for the perception and classification of people on the move, as well as for the ways in which society deals with them. As such, the flight-related figures produce a specific knowledge about migration that is closely linked to social processes of closure or opening and to competing interpretative sovereignties. The figures thus provide information about migration regimes that vary in historical and spatial terms, and in which migration has been negotiated in particular ways from the 1970s to the present day.
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