Migration and Mobility Studies

Mobility affects not only those who move, but everyone, insofar as modernity is characterized by an overall tendency to mobilize goods, services, and people. Accordingly, migration and mobility are not isolated sub-areas of social activity, but constituent practices of modern socialization. Migrations continuously challenge the affective and normative foundations of solidarities, social affiliations and related routines of action, and are thus driving forces of social transformations.

With mechanisms of deceleration and re-territorialization, the threatening nature of mobility is overcome both symbolically and materially. Sociological discourse generally counters this with concepts such as social cohesion, the literal "glue" of society. In contrast, the research area Migration and Mobility Studies emphasizes the aspect of the productivity of mobility and migration. Within this context, it is also a matter of codes with which social dynamics and development trends are translated and negotiated, for example in the form of polarization, determining migration as the new political cleavage of Western societies. The systemic ambiguity of the meaning of migration and diversity (between "innovation" and "destabilization") is particularly pronounced in the field of cultural production, where practices of deviation and rupture play a pivotal role. The productivity of migration, however, can also be seen in the fact that it becomes a medium for alternative socializations, for instance in figures of a solidarity with others that is based on concrete practices of actors in civil society, producing bonds, responsibilities, and affections and thus developing a horizontal topology of the social.

An important research field in this context is the debate about racism or the elaboration of theoretical and methodological specifics of the concept of racism in contrast to concepts such as "prejudice" or "discrimination". One central element of this project is to mobilize the transdisciplinary potential of affect theory in order to capture the constitutive indeterminacy of racism - its virtuality or latency.

Important subjects of teaching and research projects are:

• organizations of civil society and diversity
• social conflicts (for recognition, against discrimination, etc.)
• postmigrant alliances and solidarity
• affect/emotion as mediums of social transformation in the context of social movements
• machine learning and racism