Refugee studies in Austria today From challenges to a research horizon (original) (raw)
This article sets out to highlight present-day anthropological contributions to the field of forced migration and to the current debates on this topic in Europe through the experience of developing an international and in terdisciplin-ary network for the study of refugees based in Vienna, Austria. To this end, this article engages with the grounding facts of the present Central European sociohis-torical context and global political trends, grapples with shift ing and questionable research funding landscapes such as the focus on "integration, " illustrates some of the main current research challenges, and highlights pressing topics. It concludes proposing a research horizon to counter present strong limitations on forced migration research and steer this research toward a more meaningful direction.
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Refugee studies in Austria today
Focaal, 2020
This article sets out to highlight present-day anthropological contributions to the field of forced migration and to the current debates on this topic in Europe through the experience of developing an international and interdisciplinary network for the study of refugees based in Vienna, Austria. To this end, this article engages with the grounding facts of the present Central European sociohistorical context and global political trends, grapples with shifting and questionable research funding landscapes such as the focus on “integration,” illustrates some of the main current research challenges, and highlights pressing topics. It concludes proposing a research horizon to counter present strong limitations on forced migration research and steer this research toward a more meaningful direction.
Th is article sets out to highlight present-day anthropological contributions to the fi eld of forced migration and to the current debates on this topic in Europe through the experience of developing an international and in terdisciplinary network for the study of refugees based in Vienna, Austria. To this end, this article engages with the grounding facts of the present Central European sociohistorical context and global political trends, grapples with shift ing and questionable research funding landscapes such as the focus on "integration, " illustrates some of the main current research challenges, and highlights pressing topics. It concludes proposing a research horizon to counter present strong limitations on forced migration research and steer this research toward a more meaningful direction.
Changes and Continuities in Austria's Coping with Refugee Crises over Three Centuries
Journal of Austrian-American History, 2018
By bringing together the most important refugee crises that struck first the Habsburg Empire and later the Republic of Austria during the last three hundred years, this paper analyzes the longue durée experiences this country has had in dealing with such situations. It explores the driving factors behind societal and governmental responses and conceives four topics that are recurrent, if in different forms: 1) the socioeconomic disruption and the ethical imperative to provide relief; 2) the legal authorities and their power to determine a legal settlement and the ultimate right to belong; 3) their quest to maintain sovereignty and control; and 4) the question of the legitimacy of refugees as perceived by authorities but also by a (fickle) public opinion.
The Making of the Modern Refugee
This conference matters. It matters to me and it should matter to a wide range of scholars in the humanities and social sciences and indeed to any citizen interested in how and to what ends society arranges itself. This conference matters to me because it deals with a subject that is close to my heart and because it brings together some of the people from whose work I have learned a great deal. It has a wider significance because historians are beginning to take more seriously than hitherto the origins and consequences of global population displacement. Yet although we may agree on the chief sites and episodes of displacement, it is more of a challenge to delineate the agenda for discussion. Are we trying to explain the genesis of today's refugee regime, in order to draw conclusions that might inform the policies of governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international organisations such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)? If so, there is much work to be done in order to convince these organisations that they ought to be interested in past practices and outcomes. They operate mainly in the present and show scant or superficial interest in their history, which is why current efforts to organise and utilise more thoroughly the rich archives of UNHCR are so important. Or are our efforts are directed elsewhere, towards providing a history that might satisfy refugees and their descendants who negotiate the consequences of displacement? Here what is at stake is not the agenda of governments and international organisations but the complex experiences of refugees. But such are the constraints faced by refugees and historians alike that it would be foolish to claim that this project is at all straightforward. Perhaps neither the institutional-political approach nor the refugeecentred approach fully captures the purpose of this conference, in so far as we are also trying to understand the discursive realm in which displacement is invested with meanings of one kind or another. These approaches are of course not mutually exclusive. They comprise related elements of a 'refugee history' whose possibilities and pitfalls I consider at the end of my presentation.
In Transit or Asylum Seekers? Austria and the Cold War Refugees from the Communist Bloc
Maximilian Graf/Sarah Knoll, In Transit or Asylum Seekers? Austria and the Cold War Refugees from the Communist Bloc, in: Contemporary Austrian Studies 26: Migration in Austria, S. 91–111. (Studien-Verlag)., 2017
Austrian politicians and media have explicitly referenced a positive memory of the Austrian response to the various “waves of refugees” from neighboring communist countries on the occasion of the recent “refugee crisis.” The master narrative of these historical episodes, however, is weighed down by myth making and is waiting to be investigated critically. This essay presents a general introduction to the topic of Cold War refugees and then look at the vast movement of refugees into Austria in 1956 (Hungary), 1968/69 (Czechoslovakia), 1981/82 (Poland), 1989/90 (Eastern Europe in the course of the collapse of Communism). https://www.uibk.ac.at/iup/buecher/9783903122802.html https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1t89kvv
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