Arriving in the City (third-party funded project, finished)

This research project examines how individuals and families with children deal with “arriving” in the city. “Arrival” is understood here in a broad sense, as a complex socio-cultural process – also known as “integration” from a political perspective – in which official actors and top-down management of these social processes are involved.

We want to reverse this view and explore integration and social embedding processes (Ryan, 2019) from below, from the perspective of individuals and communities directly involved in this complex, multidirectional process that involves different actors, institutions, social settings and urban spaces.

We examine social embeddedness(es) from two different foci, each emphasising an important aspect of this phenomenon:

1. through issues of learning (including language learning, learning in formal and informal contexts: a good example would be the integration of Hungarian children into local schools, but also their choice of educational pathway, or issues related to the acquisition of German language in schools).

2. through the role of communities, especially their own diaspora communities, in social embedding (but this also includes specialised, professional communities such as Femspace, which is aimed at Hungarian women in need of professional development and networking).

The research will be based on qualitative methods well known in the social sciences, including individual interviews, focus group discussions and participant observation. Participatory methods will also play an important role in the project: Knowledge creation in collaboration with our interviewees through audiovisual methods will take centre stage. Photography, filming, but also joint walks through the city will help the researchers to explore and understand their interviewees’ relationship to the city, their immediate surroundings and society, as well as to each other.

If you are interested in the project, please contact ptw-forschung@sfu.ac.at.