Reading, “outside the discipline” and between the lines.
I remember in grad school someone smarter than me saying that in order to really impress the professor you had to “consult and interject the tertiary literature.” Which meant adding *more* reading to the already extensive bibliography. Taking coursework in a super transdisciplinary field like American Studies, I found it helpful to quote Stuart Hall AND Ian MacKaye in the same seminar to prove my intellectual prowess. I have since gotten out of the habit of attempting to prove much of anything.
Reading your paper, Isra, reminded me of another grad school feeling, where I could learn a WHOLE lot pretty quickly through context, but fear I might misinterpret the core concept(s). We discussed how this part of our project might play out, where I read and annotate the piece, and bring back to you some questions or clarifications focused on how the themes that I read are communicated, not on the content necessarily. My trepidation in this moment is that anything I might say will generalize and oversimplify your expertise and depth of knowledge on the topic… but! I’m committed to trying out our shared experience so here goes. I’ll attempt an un-lingo-ed abstract first:
One indicator of success in how societies accept new members is how many of those new members get jobs in the country they move to. Immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees struggle to find employment often because of the bureaucratic processes nations set up to grant legal citizenship or temporary work permits. After the Bosnian War in the early 1990’s, Austria modified some of those processes that may have contributed to smoother transitions for refugees. This research project will interview people working in the immigration section in Vienna, Austria to learn about the long term affects of those changed policies. Hopefully, Austria’s work in this area will provide a roadmap for overcoming current challenges in integrating new people into society, especially in light of events like the Syrian War.
A lot of questions I have about your project come from my ignorance of your field and its research methods, and most of them are embedded in the annotations on the paper (you could start a hypothes.is account and reply to my comments on there too!). I know one of your primary goals is to influence policy, and if I were a public policy wonk I might ask some questions about impact on GDP or the percentage of highly skilled laborers that become political exiles. As an information scientist, a question that I’d be interested in is what do societies say/produce/express about refugees and how does that impact their integration into labor markets? You write that integration is “not only something that happens passively to an individual over time, but instead is a process where an individual and society actively and selectively control aspects of integration.” Is it possible for an individual or group to influence their “information social capital” (made up but probably a thing) to effectively leverage power in their process, status, and eventual employment?
I am a big fan of things like manifestos, Calls, and declarations. You clearly state at the close of your paper that your intention is to issue recommendations on how to do all this better, based on what you learn through this project. I can’t wait to see what those shape up to look like, and then how we can work to be that change.
A few other things I read (like grad school read, not like, really read…) while reading your paper:
- Labor Market Integration: The Key to Welcoming Refugees and Migrants in High Income Countries [PDF]. Samantha Wilkinson
- European Commission, Peer Review on ‘Integration of Refugees into the Labour Market’, Berlin (Germany), 11–12 October 2017
- World Bank, Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets
- OECD (2018), International Migration Outlook 2018, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/migr_outlook-2018-en
