Postdoctoral Researchers

Assessing labour market outcomes of German (r)emigrants, this postdoctoral research project focuses on internationally mobile people from a highly privileged source country. The overall research question asks to which extent migration gains differ between migrants, i.e. are not distributed equally. In particular, labour market outcomes can be expected to differ by (a) migration characteristics such as migration direction (emigration vs. remigration), migration motives and processes, and (b) migrants’ characteristics (e.g. gender, family status, occupation). To assess these patterns, data of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study is being used, covering German citizens who either left or returned to Germany in 2017/2018. Depending on the particular research questions, this data will be combined with data on the internationally non-mobile population in Germany and/or major destination countries.

The proliferation of various territorial formations, from migrant and refugee camps to buffer zones and detention centers, has been interpreted as a reorganisation of power geographies of exclusion on a global scale (Agier 2013). When approached through the lens of migration governance, such technologies of control are said to function as apparatuses of capture – disenfranchising and containing different categories of undesirable populations. However, this project focuses on the productive potentialities of the socio-spatial governance in relation to the constitution of labour relations on a local scale. By bringing into focus the experiences of Bulgarian and Romanian migrants in segregated urban areas associated with the label ‘poverty migration’, I examine the productive subordination of the urban poor as disposable labour. I use the optic of the ‘urban zone of exception’ to tease out the precise mechanisms through which technologies of containment, securitisation, policing and spatial displacement are deployed into ‘ordinary’ political geographies to turn them into bounded spaces for the processing of racialised disposability with effects on labour extraction. This conceptual approach seeks to advance a better understanding of the local-level dynamics between labour, mobility and political apparatuses of control by putting into dialogue debates on emergent spaces for (exceptional) governmentality and the localisation of bordering apparatuses, on the one hand, and the spatial politics of labour, on the other.