Individual projects

The Migration and Social Policy research group has been working at the Institute for Work, Skills and Training (IAQ) of the University of Duisburg-Essen since 01.09.2017. It is funded by the BMAS (Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs) as part of the funding network Interdisciplinary Social Policy Research (FIS) in the junior research group (Nachwuchsgruppe) funding line. There are four qualification projects in total: two habilitation and two PhD projects. One of the habilitation projects as well as the academic support by the project manager, Prof. Dr. Ute Klammer, are financed from the IAQ’s own resources.

The interdisciplinary research group investigates how local social policies have been realigned in the course of forced migration in recent years, how municipalities and other local social policy actors deal with the social needs of migrants and, above all, how refugees co-produce welfare statehood with their specific resources. The thematic focus is on the fields of education, paid work, health care and forms of local networking.

The four projects focus on the co-production of local social policy by refugees with their thematic priorities in approximately 15 different municipalities. Thus, the research group not only makes a key contribution to the mapping of the field of municipal social policies, but also strives for conceptual summary statements on development trends and action requirements of the welfare state under transnational conditions.