Who we are

Members of the Heinrich-Boell Research Group

Risks of Exclusion and Strategies Inclusion in an Expanded Europe

Title of dissertation: Mobilising the new Europe: On the construction of regional development in Poland

In my Ph.D. project I'm focusing on strategies of regional development as an example of changing modes of social inclusion in the enlarging Europe. My research aims at exploring the conditions, limits and possibilities of planned intervention on the sub-national level. It centres around the questions of how regional development agents try to redefine the conditions for social inclusion in selected regions and to which extent they are able to do so. Whilst development studies are often based on structural or political-economic accounts, a more constructivist perspective is applied in this project in order to thwart the usual dichotomy of anonymous global forces and harmonious local lifeworlds.
Institution-building on the regional level has been a current issue in the new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe over the past decade, above all. Therefore, I'm going to analyse the development strategies of two selected sub-national regions in Poland by means of detailed content analyses. Furthermore, I'm going to conduct expert interviews with Polish key actors in the field of regional development in order to reconstruct the process of drafting, re-shaping and implementing the development strategies in the selected regions.

Sina Farzin, M.A.

Title of dissertation: Rhetorics of Exclusion - On the Relationship of Concepts of Society and Social Exclusion

In the ongoing debate on social exclusion as a new form of inequality in German and French sociology during the last 15 years, no convincing notion of the term has been established. This theoretical deficit is usually explained by the public and social-political origins of the term. It is argued that the term's potential for politization and dramatization is blindly copied into sociological discourse.

In my dissertation project I want to propose reasons for these deficiencies that go beyond the discoursive history of the concept. Rather, I assume that a systematic and consistent definition of exclusion would result in an internal theoretical antagonism because it raises the question of the limitations of the social. Any definition of social exclusion refers to an always already implied unit of social inclusion, which regulates as a center of reference the criteria for what is signified as social exclusion. I therefore want to suggest analyzing the constitutive relationship between the underlying concepts of society and the problem of social exclusion in the central theories of Niklas Luhmann, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu through a rhetorical analysis.

Jan-Hendrik Kamlage, Dipl.-Pol.

Title of dissertation: The Legitimacy of the European Regional Policy. A critical Analysis of the Horizontal Partnership Model in different Regions of the European Union

The European Regional Policy, due to its redistributive and egalitarian character, is anticipated to secure the European Union's public support. For this purpose, civil society participation represents a key element. In my dissertation, I will analyse subnational processes of civil society inclusion by looking at processes and institutions such as civil society organisation (CSO) in three European regions. My assessment of the inclusion is based on a normative framework derive on deliberative theory. The key questions with regard to this are: What are the conditions under which organized civil society currently participate? To what extent do these processes, settings and the CSO inclusion facilitate and advance the appearance of democratically legitimate governance?

Nadya Srur, Dipl.-Päd. (interkulturelle Pädagogik)

Title of dissertation: Strategies for Labor Market Integration of Highly Qualified Migrants – Case Studies of European Immigration Countries

The European integration process, globalization dynamics, structural changes on national levels and demographic shifts along with an increasing demand for skilled labor, contribute to changing working and living conditions. This builds the foundation for different inclusion possibilities but also involves exclusion risks for various social groups, including migrants. The migrants' level of education and qualification is crucial for a successful integration process – this is consensus not only in the scientific community but also in the political realm. Therefore, we could presume that highly qualified migrants do not face prevalent occupational integration problems, but can integrate more easily into the labor market due to their specific skills. However, studies reveal the contrary: high unemployment rates or inappropriate employment and de-skilling. The question of finding out how situations like this come about goes hand in hand with the need to comprehend highly qualified as a group with special needs in integration processes and especially in further education systems.
The research study aims to gather and analyze occupational inclusion strategies in Germany compared to Great Britain and France with special regard to further education concepts for highly qualified migrants. Furthermore, good practice indicators and approaches shall be identified and recommendations for an optimization of inclusion strategies in Germany shall be expressed.

Susanne Tönsmann, Dipl.-Pol.

Title of Dissertation: Reconfigurations of Citizenships in the European Union. Non-Citizenship in Latvia.

Citizenship in the European Union has become “a laboratory for recombining elements of citizenship“ (Bauböck). Indeed did the 1990s witness profound changes concerning citizenship: The collapse of the Soviet Union left millions of Russians living in former Soviet republics and often outside the boundaries of citizenship, many EU states changed citizenship legislation and naturalization measures, and the EU introduced Union citizenship in 1993. Citizenship - conventionally perceived to be about rights, membership and practices and being a relation between an individual and a particular state - is not the neatly defined concept it allegedly used to be.
My dissertation engages with a form of citizenship that is new to the laboratory. I look at non-citizenship in Latvia and am especially interested in (a) how (non-)citizenship issues were debated in the accession negotiations with the EU, and (b) how (non-)citizenship relates to other forms of citizenship in the EU, especially Union citizenship. In my dissertation I seek to explicate the characteristics of non-citizenship as a form of citizenship and situate it in the laboratory of diverse European citizenships. While scholars have analyzed the influences of international organizations on the development of citizenship policies in the Baltics, there is little inquiry into the European dimension and repercussions of non-citizenship and how non-citizenship relates to other citizenships in the EU, especially Union citizenship.