Annotation
This course is led by a guest lecturer, Julia de Freitas Sampaio who is going to give a block teaching in these concrete time slots: 16.11./ 17.00 - 19.50/ room 105/ 2 slots 18.11/ 11.00 - 13.50/ room 312/ 2 slots 21.11./9.30 - 13.50/ room 312/ 2 slots 22.11./ 11.00 - 13.50/ room 405/ 2 slots
Please, be prepared to allocate your time to this slots so that you are able to fulfill criteria to pass the course. More info you will find in the SIS.
Here is the zoom link: https://hu-berlin.zoom.us/j/61886217381 and here the space where the students can find the class material: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1CGSRxJ7oUMpV44yi05wTDEJ5nQI-xa4l?usp=sharing
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
With an intensified influx of immigrants, Europe saw multiple new challenges arising. My monography focuses on the impact xenophobic experiences have on language learning and immigrant integration. There are, however, many sub-questions adjacent to it such as: what is integration? Can we measure it? We clearly do not have any physical comparisons, one cannot use Kg or meters of integration, and questionnaires do not seem to achieve the goal either.
Public policies and all sorts of associations have been created to assess immigrants and immigrant integration, however, the lack of unified measurement makes it hard to understand their efficiency.
Even the European Commission (2013) itself struggles with a broad definition. But, even more complex than creating a definition, is creating one that takes into account the immigrants’ point of view without exoticisms and without propagating racial hierarchies. Many authors have been drawing attention to this question. Schinkel (2018) mentions how very often immigrant integration is measured according to the understanding a state has of its own nation. This can be regarded as problematic for more reasons than I have pages to write in this brief introduction. Meisner and Heil
(2020) have also denounced and criticized the rather eurocentric approach many institutions have.
Respect for multiculturalism often appears in research about immigrant integration and it could be an important piece when it comes to finding a way out of this conceptual quagmire. Multiculturalism is also often mentioned when politicians talk about integration but those same politicians do not seem to agree on its definition nor do they apply this idea Schinkel (2018).
In order to achieve those results, the students will be given access to the initial material needed to understand the debates around those topics. The students will then develop their own critical view on this topic and will come up with creative options. The investigation will be done through bibliography review, research, and analysis of policies and institutions.
The research does not have to stop at “ways to measure integration” though. From this initial problem we can steam many other sub-questions such as “what is multiculturalism”? Among many others.