A large body of research has shed light on the conditions of well-educated migrants in Sweden and, more generally, the national labor market, creating a “glass ceiling” for academics of migrant origin. The research literature also highlights the existence of hidden hierarchies related to the race and ethnicity, country of origin, and social class of migrant professionals. However, fluctuations in academic careers among individuals of migrant origin have seldom been elucidated from an insider perspective, with the help of ego documents and personal narratives. Such a scarcity of self-representation and personal testimonies among a sector of the academic population who are otherwise skillful communicators of their research findings and disciplinary knowledge may indicate continuing challenges for participation, representation, and professional recognition of this category of migrants.

The presented study aimed to address these issues and explore the possibility of cross-pollination between postmigrant perspectives and Bourdieu’s conceptualizations of academia. Spanning ethnology, migration, and literary studies, the project sought to explore the role of friendships and personal alliances in the professional careers of academics and cultural producers who self-identify as migrants and migrant descendants. To collect personal stories about pathways into Swedish academia and processes of professional embedding, establishment, and gaining positions of responsibility, the project team conducted 35 face-to-face interviews with academics from various disciplinary backgrounds who hold prominent academic positions at Swedish universities from 2021 to 2023.

Standard questions discussed during the interviews included the establishment of the interlocutors in Swedish academia, the role of their colleagues and mentors, ideas about professional recognition, the role of contacts with individuals of the same ethnic origin, and the use of different languages in academia.

Using personal stories as a starting point, this research asks what we can learn about the dispositions of migrant academics—mindsets and imageries, both anchored in the past and embodied, but also narrated—that inform their actions and representation in the academic field. These narratives can be formulated in anecdotes, spontaneous chats, informal exchanges of institutional lore, and pre-arranged research interviews. When accounting for the peripeties and epiphanies of their careers, various “academic populations” unveil a narrative truth resonating with a wide variety of people. Presumably, two established analytical constructs, namely narrative identities and ideographs, can serve as a platform for configuring narrative truths in our material collected from academics of migrant origin. Viewed through these lenses, abstract “institutional constraints,” faceless “beneficial circumstances,” and epic “battles in the academic field” are transformed into networks of individuals as stock characters creating alliances and engaging in interactions with gatekeepers, allies, and authorities. The logic of the academic field may also prove to be more complicated, as experiences of academic competition and solidarity can be informed not only by practical calculations of gain and loss and the guarding of one’s interests but also by more intricate, normatively defined self-positioning, subscription, and situatedness.

While the population with a migration background continues to grow in the DACH countries (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), journalists from diverse backgrounds remain underrepresented in newsrooms. Journalists with a migration background make up between 1.2% and 5% of the journalist population in Germany (Geißler et al., 2009; Pöttker, 2017; 2022), 6% in Austria (Kaltenbrunner & Lugschitz, 2021), and approximately 5% in Switzerland (Bonfadelli, 2010). Awareness of diversity is gradually increasing in Austrian and German newsrooms (Horz et al., 2020, p. 30; Kaltenbrunner & Lugschitz, 2021, p. 2), leading to greater visibility for Black people and people of color in the media (Lünenborg & Medeiros, 2021, p. 96). However, there is an expectation for journalists of color to serve as experts on issues related to racism (Sorce, 2023, p. 782). Journalists with migration backgrounds use various platforms such as books, podcasts, and social media to make aspects of their personal and professional trajectories visible.

This paper is grounded in the concept of postmigrant societies, emphasizing daily migration realities and societal transformations while recognizing plurality (e.g., Foroutan, 2019), along with postmigrant media cultures, which focus on changes in media participation resulting from migration (Malmberg & Pantti, 2020). Postmigrants are individuals who reject differentiation based on otherness and racialization, seeking “a self-confident place” within society (Alkin, 2021, p. 113). In this project, I aim to define postmigrant journalists. The research question for this paper is: How do DACH journalists with migration biographies position themselves within the journalistic field?

This paper draws on Bourdieu’s field theory, focusing on the journalistic field, and incorporates the concept of symbolic borders. Journalistic actors’ positions within the field are influenced by habitus and various forms of capital (e.g., cultural and economic), leading to inequalities and power dynamics (Meyen & Riesmeyer, 2012; Scheu, 2012; Bourdieu, 1998). Symbolic borders function as regulatory tools in global journalism, determining who is featured in Western news and influencing participation in public discourse (Chouliaraki, 2017). Journalists with migration biographies, while working in the field, face inclusion challenges such as underrepresentation in newsrooms and racist behaviors.

Methodologically, this paper relies on narrative interviews that emphasize strong biographical elements. The sample comprises 15 journalists from the second or third generation of migrants in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, exploring aspects such as self-description, the interconnection of professional and personal biographies, and experiences of exclusion. The paper adopts an intersectional approach, recognizing that individuals possess multiple identities and senses of belonging influenced by various factors and experiences, such as migration background, socioeconomic status, and skin color.

Preliminary findings indicate that journalists incorporate migration in various forms into their work (e.g., reporting on minorities or topics that also influenced their lives), showcasing a deep understanding of the hybrid lived experiences of postmigrants. Decisions about exclusion or inclusion are influenced by factors such as appearance and socialization. Despite writing about personal experiences, journalists seem to balance private and professional boundaries, expressing concerns about the objectivity a journalist can maintain.

This paper is part of a larger PhD project.

The UNHCR noted that 35.3 million of the world’s population were refugees in 2022. The percentage who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or questioning), intersex, asexual or gender fluid (LGBTQIA+) is not documented (Shaw & Verghese, 2022). However, research indicates that LGBTQIA+ refugees experience great amounts of hardship prior to and during flight and as they attempt to settle into a new country (Piwowarczyk, Fernandez & Sharma, 2017; Shaw & Verghese, 2022). Challenges include the need to hide their true identities in order to avoid discrimination by other refugees and members of the host country, and asylum adjudicators requesting compromising documentation to prove their sexual status.

Safe Place International (SPI), a non-profit organization founded in 2017, is committed to helping LGBTQIA+ refugees and asylum seekers throughout the world (SPI, 2022). It currently provides 33 safe houses in Africa, Central America, and Europe and is expanding its European base due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

A primary project of SPI is The Dream Academy (TDA). Started in 2021, TDA is a unique online learning opportunity provided by academics, social-emotional learning experts, members of the arts community, and business organizations to provide SPI students with opportunities to gain social and emotional learning skills, understand their rights, and gain career skills.

An initial survey of the 35 students in the pilot program indicated that 94% felt more confident after attending TDA, 100% gained leadership skills, 97% felt prepared to take next steps, and 94% gained the ability to trust others (SPI, 2022). Since the initial pilot, SPI has increased TDA opportunities for more SPI residents. The present study examines results from the pilot study through qualitative research. Our team transcribed over 100 hours of video from the pilot course and coded the transcriptions to determine the predominant themes to answer our research question: In what ways does The Dream Academy provide mechanisms for support and sustainability among its population of LGBTQIA+ residents?

Internationally, LGBTQI+ individuals in numerous countries suffer from discriminatory laws, and some countries have laws that criminalize same sex relations, with 13 that make it an act punishable by death (Byrnes, 2019; Human Rights Watch, 2022). The Dream Academy program addresses major needs for the community. For example, it creates a sense of community and provides a space for the participants to trust others, as they learn that they are not alone in the difficulties that they have faced.

References

Byrnes, H. (2019, 14 June). 13 countries where being gay is legally punishable by death. USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/06/14/countries-where-being-gay-is-legally-punishable-by-death/39574685/

Human Rights Watch (2022). Outlawed: The love that dare not speak its name. http://internap.hrw.org/features/features/lgbt_laws/

Piwowarczyk, L., P. Fernandez and A. Sharma (2017), “Seeking asylum: Challenges faced by the LGB community”, Journal of Immigrant Minority Health, Vol. 19, pp. 723-732, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-016-0363-9.

Safe Place International, https://www.safeplaceinternational.org/

Shaw, A., & Verghese, N. (2022). LGBTQI+ refugees and asylum seekers: A review of research and data needs. Williams Institute School of Law, https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/LGBTQI-Refugee-Review-Jul-2022.pdf

It is a central aim of postmigrant research on migration to rethink (im)mobilities and processes of arrival in migration societies. This entails a critical engagement with existing – including one’s own – research, its implicit assumptions, common practices, and often unquestioned understandings. Particularly, the positionality of researchers and their relationship to the participants of a study, as well as the limitations of purely scientific knowledge production are of primary concern.

Janine Dahinden and her colleagues propose “decentering” as a promising strategy for this type of reflexivity in migration research: a process in which researchers distance themselves from established conceptions of their subject while simultaneously developing alternative approaches (Dahinden et al. 2021, 536). Our research project aimed to implement this strategy of decentering, which we introduce in this contribution. Employing an explicitly transdisciplinary, participatory, and multimethod research approach, we focused on the arrival of refugees in Austria. We collaborated with artists from the fields of music, literature, and photography who translated their experiences of arrival into artworks; subsequently, we invited recipients to interpret these artworks. Our analysis focused on how processes of meaning-making, associated with creating and interpreting art, promote a “reframing” of concepts related to refugee migration and offer alternative perspectives on the arrival of refugees.

Drawing on our experiences, we aim to shed light on and discuss the application of decentering strategies in our own research. We examine potentials, limitations, and challenges through three selected aspects:

(1) Art as a lens: By collaborating with artists and incorporating artistic perspectives, we expanded the sociological perspective on arriving to include an alternative form of knowledge production. We particularly focused on the potential for mutual translation between art and science – as well as the potential of art to develop imaginations and utopias, to reveal (yet) unrealised options for action, or, as stated in the conference call, to design “a new topography of the possible”.

(2) Participatory research: Adopting a participatory research attitude facilitated the dissolution of an often hierarchically conceived relationship between researchers and participants. The participating artists thus became co-researchers, participants in group discussions became experts, and competent interpreters of artworks.

(3) Reflection on researchers’ positionalities: The composition of our research team aimed to implement multi-perspective research and decentering by merging “insider” and “outsider” knowledge as well as different experiences with arriving. The ongoing reflection on respective positioning – not only of individual researchers but also of the team composition as a whole – has proven to be a particularly effective measure of decentering.

Through our discussion of the application of decentering strategies in the exploration of arriving in the context of forced migration, we aim to contribute to the debate on the benefits of a methodological realignment of migration research and to highlight the added value of a multi-perspective view on refugees’ arriving in migration societies.

Literature

Dahinden, Janine, Carolin Fischer and Joanna Menet (2021): Knowledge Production, Reflexivity and the Use of Categories in Migration Studies: Tackling Challenges in the Field. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies 44 (4): 535–554.