Research Area: Reza Bayat is a guest researcher at the Center for Global Migration Studies and an advanced PhD candidate of Cultural Anthropology / European Ethnology in the university of Göttingen. His research interests include migration and ethnographic (border) regime research, Health, trauma, narrative research, body and emotions. In his PhD project titled “Trauma narratives, ruptured memories and politics of life: an ethnographic research of Iranian Refugees and asylum-seekers in Germany”, he addresses on the one hand the construction, propagation, and instrumentalizations of trauma, suffering, and victimhood narratives for the production, regulation, and administration of Iranian refugees as objects of trauma and controllable, racialized others. On the other hand, he focuses on the lives, narratives, and life-stories of groups of Iranian refugees in Germany in order to grasp and reflect their own narratives, which have been excluded from media and knowledge production as well as from the politics of care. Currently, he is conducting a new research project with the title “Accessibility as politics of life: A multi-level analysis of migration-related and regime-building policies in the German health care system” in the research group “Public Health and migration from a global and interdisciplinary perspective” at CeMig. In this project, he concentrates on migration and migration-related regime building policies in the German health care system from an institutional analytical perspective in order to investigate the role of policy-making and institutional formations in migrants’ accessibility to the health care system. This project examines the different ways the health care system and regime-building and bordering mechanisms in Germany go hand in hand and shape each other, while documenting and analyzing the ways migration histories and discourses inform and shape how “right to health” and “protection of life” are produced, defined, and implemented on various levels.

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Dr. Aleksandra Lewicki (May 2022 - July 2022)

Institute of Cultural Anthropology/ European Ethnology

Research Area: Aleksandra Lewicki is Co-Director of the Sussex European Institute and a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sussex. Her work investigates boundary-making and structural inequalities in post-colonial Europe. In particular, she is interested in political mobilisation, and the role institutions play in crafting and sustaining categories of difference. She has written on citizenship and activism, institutional racism in the welfare state, anti-Muslim racism and on the racialization of ‘Eastern Europeans’ in Britain and Germany. Her work has appeared in leading journals such as Sociology, Patterns of Prejudice, Citizenship Studies and Ethnic and Racial Studies. She is an In-House Associate Editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. From May to July 2022, she is a visiting researcher at CeMig. In this time, she will finalize the publication circle and share her findings from three research projects on institutional racism in the German welfare state – including research she conducted on ‘Care Ethics and the Production of Racial and Moral Others’ as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin and two collaborative follow-up projects on discrimination in health care provision commissioned by the Stiftung Mercator and Antidiskriminierungstelle des Bundes respectively. Together with Sabine Hess, Jelka Günther, Reza Bayat and others she develops new research into institutional cultures and dynamics of racism in health and social care; she also forges new collaborative networks for an interdisciplinary study into Central East European communities’ strategies of political resistance in Britain and Germany.

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Student research

Wentje Lübbing

Department for Social and Communication Psychology