Migration as a prism for the crises of our time – Manuela Bojadžijev about her research project

This project has set itself quite a challenge: Manuela Bojadžijev and Robin Celikates don’t just want to rethink things: the two professors aim to "re-formulate what social relationships would need to be like in order to address humanity’s current existential questions", as their project description states. New research designs are to be developed for this purpose. That sounds rather fundamental.

Their work is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation as part of the "Aufbruch"- programme: this supports researchers in the humanities and cultural studies in following their curiosity and taking the first step into something new and unknown. Funding is provided for projects with a ‘pioneering character’ that not only offer new perspectives on already familiar research topics but also explore entirely new areas and themes of research. 

The two researchers’ project, which focuses on inventory and invention, began in 2024 and was extended after two years to run until the end of 2026. The two researchers are investigating three central questions: What new forms of governance look like in different states; what the challenges of climate change and their effects on human mobility entail; and how racist configurations of the social are constituted in a global context. The two researchers operate like botanists who venture into a forest and collect important plants here and there, in order to bring them together in a new, large garden and allow them to flourish. "Migration is constitutive," says Bojadžijev. "But the current understanding of mobility is still mired in categories that no longer do justice to the reality of an interconnected global society." It is about a reality check. That is the inventory. And then it is about a re-measurement. That is the invention.

The meetings explore where people encounter limitations in their work, limitations arising from the outdated and narrow categories of migration. "For example, an organisation such as ‘Pro Asyl’ has to realign its approach because a cornerstone of international law, such as the Geneva Convention on Refugees, is now a matter of controversy."

Bojadžijev and Celikates’ task is to keep finding these people; so far, there have been three workshops on governance and numerous others on racist configurations of the social in a global context. "Sometimes it doesn’t work out," she says. "Then people don’t understand our approach." But failure is to be expected in this kind of basic research. "In another project, we were researching a courier platform," explains the anthropologist, "because it has a strong migration component that has often been neglected until now. But in the meantime, the platform we were researching was shut down – due to fierce competition in the sector." When the exchange in these workshops is successful, they prove to be well-suited to the scale, complexity and temporal and spatial scope of the current challenges. That sounds diplomatic. But a readjustment is needed.

Old-fashioned ways

As recently as the 2000s, there was still debate as to whether the Federal Republic of Germany was a country of immigration, “and this after decades of so-called ‘guest workers’, flight from war zones, the 1990s with internal migration following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the EU’s eastward enlargement, as well as the influx of ethnic German repatriates”. Times were changing, but the knowledge in the academic toolkits seemed outdated, based precisely on the assumption of static societies, which obscured the view of changing mobility patterns. “Through these workshops, we seek out these central contradictions in order to ultimately see the bigger picture.” This approach would ‘de-migrantise’ migration research. Social research would become ‘migrantised’. In doing so, the project is blazing a new trail. “In the end, sometimes you’re not even researching migration anymore,” she laughs. “The fundamental questions – how our society is reorganising itself, what is actually happening right now – are centrally linked to the mobility of people.”

The nation state on its own is a thing of the past

As an example of this shift in perspective – in the spirit of ‘Seeing like a Migrant’ – Bojadžijev cites digital platforms, which she regards as new territories. “These create new global corridors that undermine the sovereign authority of the nation state.” Data flows and human movements merge, and in some cases work and location become separated – such as when someone in Bangalore works for a company in Texas. There is scarcely any area of our shared lives – be it in care, in cutting-edge research or indeed in digital infrastructures – that is not permeated by processes of mobility: “To perceive this reality, we must seek out new research designs and epistemological collaborations.” This is what is known as a new beginning – as reflected in the name of the programme established by the foundation.

A number of publications have appeared in the course of this project, and beyond; the "Handbook of Racism Research" is due to be published in August 2026. “We follow people and adopt their perspective,” she says. The research designs to be developed are to be based on fundamentally new generalisations, but would also need to be methodologically re-conceived. “Migration research has always been characterised by a methodological nationalism. But as a general rule in academia, anyone with a strong hypothesis runs the risk of failing to see many other things.” Bojadžijev and Celikates wish to break free from this epistemological impasse. “When research derives its questions and concepts from the day-to-day political debate, it loses its scientific detachment and its independence.” The processes of globalisation, however, call for universal theories. If we stick with the image of migration as a prism, this breaks down the white light of the state order into its spectral components, thereby revealing global interconnections and “the constant struggle for the right to have rights”, as Bojadžijev quotes Hannah Arendt. The project’s approach is therefore deeply humanistic, centring on the key question: how must the social bond be conceived in this new world? Bojadžijev and Celikates, at any rate, are working on it.