transnational research - transnational routes

As part of its collaborative work on the TRANSIT MIGRATION project, the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology in Frankfurt/Main focuses on the people and practices shaping, at the borders of Southeast Europe, a newly emerging topography of migration. In particular, the Frankfurt team is examining the tightly meshed, confrontational interactions between migrants and the border regime. For the migrants, transnationalization appears to be a means of circumvention and transgression – a way of temporarily undermining national claims to control. The border regime has reacted to these strategies by Europeanizing migration policies and extending migration control mechanisms transnationally. In this context, the team will pay special attention to the ambivalent contrinutions of humanitarian relief and non-governmental organizations, which are playing an increasingly important role in the design of EU and transatlantic migration policies.

Investigating these practices and groups in a scientific manner is not only relatively unprecedented in the new transit countries and migrant destinations of Southeast Europe, but also in the "old" countries of immigration in Western Europe. In Germany, for example, the public and academic debate is currently restricted to the national dimension, and it will remain so as long as "immigration" and "integration" are treated as a local problem, ignoring what are actually much more extensive ties to a new transnational topography of migration. The aim of the TRANSIT MIGRATION team is thus to make these contexts visible, using a variety of methods to transnationalize the debate in Southeast Europe and in Germany. The team’s findings and insights will provide a foundation for visual productions, especially for the project exhibition in 2005.