Current Issues in Asylum and Migration

____Workshop concept
 

The aim of the workshop is to bring together scholars who work on different current issues of asylum and migration research. The workshop will be structured along the following questions: How do asylum seekers select their destination countries (if at all) and how do they get there? How do states and the EU regulate asylum and refugee flows? What do we know about the implementation and outcome of migration and asylum policies, for instance regarding integration? And how does the native population react to asylum seekers and refugees? These research questions will allow us to approach the topic from both micro- and macro-sociological perspectives and on the basis of political science, sociological and economic theories. ◼

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___ Guests

Claire Adida, University of California San Diego

Zorzeta Bakaki, University of Essex

Bernd Beber, WZB Berlin Social Science Centre

Tobias Eule, University of Bern

Henning Finseraas, Institute for Social Research Oslo

Philipp Lutz, University of Bern

Moritz Marbach, ETH Zurich

Jesús Fernández-Huertas Moraga, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Regine Schmidt, University of Bamberg

Jörg Welker, University of Bamberg

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___ Keynote

The Keynote speech will be held by Claire Adida, an associate professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, United States. Her current research investigates the conditions that reduce out-group discrimination, and the strategies vulnerable minorities employ to navigate discriminatory environments.

 Social scientists have shown how easily individuals are moved to exclude outgroup members. Can we foster inclusion instead? This study leverages one of the most significant humanitarian crises of our time to test whether, and under what conditions, American citizens adopt more inclusionary behavior toward Syrian refugees. We conduct a nationally representative survey of over 5,000 American citizens in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election and experimentally test whether a perspective-taking exercise increases inclusionary behavior in the form of an anonymous letter supportive of refugees to be sent to the 45th President of the United States. Our results indicate that the perspective-taking message increases the likelihood of writing such a positive letter by two to five percentage points. By contrast, an informational message had no significant effect on letter writing. The effect of the perspective-taking exercise occurs in the short run only, manifests as a behavioral rather than an attitudinal response, and is strongest among Democrats. However, this effect also appears in the subset of Republican respondents, suggesting that efforts to promote perspective taking may move to action a wide cross-section of individuals.

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The digital version of the Programme Booklet can be found here.(469.3 KB, 17 pages) Printed copies will be provided during the workshop.

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___Organizers

The workshop was organized by members of the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences:

Marc Helbling, Political Science
Caroline Schultz, Political Science
 

Image Credits: © Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences