Political Literacy in Migration Society

What do students think and know politically about transnational migration? Which individual and collective positions do they experience in their everyday contexts constituted by phenomena of transnational migration? How do they refer analytically and normatively to the fact that migration of people and cultural lifestyles is one of the key issues of contemporary reality in Europe? The research project Political Literacy in the Migration Society (PLiM) will investigate the forms and types of political articulation of students in the eighth grade at selected schools in the cities of Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich. The project is designed to analyse the political articulations of students so that forms of democratic education with regard to the conditions of the migration society, their interactive (enabling) conditions, and their effects will become empirically and theoretically evident. Phenomena of transnational migration are most influential for societal urban life. Thus, being educated with regard to issues of the (world) migration society is a fundamental political demand of our times. Literacy thereby is understood as the context specific handling of linguistically formulated questions and representations of social reality. Against this background, political literacy constitutes the practice of context-relational political articulation, and means reading social reality and referring to it in a meaningful and appropriate way. Thereby it is characterised by knowledge of political issues, a degree of experiential self-reflection relating to this knowledge, as well as arguing appropriate political standpoints. Key research questions are: Which different forms of political articulation do exist in schools in migration society, and which conditions do form the basis of such articulations? Which circumstances do facilitate the development of positive forms of political articulation (political literacy) in the migration society? The project works with the methods of audio-supported participatory observations, ethnographic interviews, discourse analysis, and stimulus-based group conversations. By the complementary comparison of schools in three global cities and the integration of different research strategies and methods the project is innovative in creating a research design, which promises insights on political literacy as an context-related phenomena beyond methodological nationalism and micro-contextual reductionism.

PLiM - a D-A-CH-project financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Swiss National Science Fund (SNF), with sites in Bielefeld, Zurich and Innsbruck-focused on political literacy and the process of political education in daily schooling. Political literacy is not measured by competencies defined in advance; rather it is manifested as social practice. Using an exploratory ethnographic research strategy, the focus was centered on the micropolitics of the classroom, in which conflict dimensions and ascriptions relevant for migration society are negotiated. In the course of inquiry it emerged that in each of the four schools researched, the addressing of pupils, embedded expectations, norms, ascriptions and how they were dealt with differ substantially. On one hand, we encountered practices of addressing pupils as an educated future elite or as self-responsible top performers, in school contexts in which - instead of a deficit-oriented perspective - predominant is a fundamentally positive attitude toward diversity and the recognition of migration as normalcy. On the other, however, we also noted that pupils, especially in the context of deprivileging modes of schooling, are homogeneously ascribed a conglomerate of deficits structured via linkages between 'poor access to education' (Bildungsferne), poverty and migration. Firmly rooted in the school culture, the school perceives itself functioning benevolently as a compensatory authority, seeking to level out the 'deficits' which the pupils are defined to have. Single-school attitudes can facilitate or hinder processes of shaping literacy. They also can generate forms of literacy that - for example, in an ironic gesture by pupils rejecting ascriptions in so-called 'high risk schools' (Brennpunktschule) - only emerge as such against the backdrop of the given school culture. The variety of dealing with migration-related diversity clashes with the binary confrontation in the public between 'problem school' and 'normal school'. When the school functions as a place that celebrates diversity, the discourse about 'belonging' remains nonetheless ambivalent. Because proceeding from a distribution into Us/Them, categories of belonging emerge to which the students must orient, and which frame their space for self-positioning. The research has also made clear how important it would be for processes of political education to interrogate school-specific modes of diversity and its construction principles. The ascriptions that pupils are confronted with are read/reinterpreted by those pupils, for example, by means of ironic rejection, or pupils refuse to accept ascribed identities, or question categories of belonging. The cultivation of competency in reading and speaking in regard to political realities would not least call for a political literacy that turns away from the customary differentiation of 'migration background yes/no', foregrounding instead a different new vocabulary, and thus can function to contribute concretely to normalizing migration.