Am 18. September lud die Professur für Chemiedidaktik interessierte Osnabrücker:innen zur Experimentiermeile 2026 auf den Ledenhof ein. Neben zahlreichen Projekten aus den Naturwissenschaften waren auch das am IMIS angesiedelte Projekt “FuturMig – Wissenschaftsraum ‘Zukünfte der Migration'” und das Transferprojekt des Sonderforschungsbereichs 1604 “Produktion von Migration” vertreten und gewährten den Besucherinnen und Besuchern Einblicke in die Arbeit geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlicher Fächer.
Foto: Johannes Pufahl.
Mehr als 40 Stände reihten sich am 18. September auf dem Ledenhof aneinander, betreut von Experimentierfreudigen aus Kindertagesstätten und Schulen über die Universität bis hin zu Osnabrücker Unternehmen. Unter dem Motto “Getragen von der ganzen Stadt” zeigten die Aktiven Experimente für alle Altersgruppen und ließen die Besucher:innen auch selbst Hand anlegen.
FuturMig präsentierte unter dem Titel “OUT of the Box” die Lebensgeschichten von fünf Personen. Anhand von Gegenständen, die Umbruch, Halt und Zukunft symbolisieren, diskutierten Vera Hanewinkel, Feline Engling Cardoso und Philipp Schäfer mit den Besucher:innen darüber, was ihre eigenen Erfahrungen mit diesen Lebensgeschichten verbindet, und wie eine gerechte Zukunft für alle aussehen könnte. Auf einer gemeinsamen Pinnwand konnten die Besucher:innen ihre konkreten Forderungen und Visionen miteinander teilen.
Links: Annika Heyen im Gespräch mit SFB 1604-Kollegin Helen Schwenken. Rechts: Tim Ott mit Lukas Hennies beim VR-Experiment (Fotos: Jessica Wehner).
Das Transferprojekt “Reflexive Migrationsforschung im Museum” hatte seine VR-Brillen im Gepäck und ließ die Besucher:innen der Experimentiermeile an seinem Experiment “Changing Places” teilhaben. In diesem bekommen Proband:innen digitale Versionen des Osnabrücker Friedenssaals in Virtual Reality zu sehen. Das Experiment geht der Frage nach, wie sich die Wahrnehmung und das Identifikationspotenzial von historisch aufgeladenen Orten verändern, wenn sie anders aussehen als gewöhnlich.
Weitere Möglichkeiten zur Teilnahme am VR-Experiment bieten sich jeweils mittwochs am 7. Oktober, 21. Oktober und 28. Oktober von 12 bis 18 Uhr im Foyer des Studierendenzentrums (StudZ) auf dem Campus Innenstadt. Eine Terminbuchung ist hier möglich.
Einladungsflyer zum VR-Experiment “Changing Places” am 7.10., 21.10. und 28.10., jeweils von 12 bis 18 Uhr (Grafik: Annika Heyen).
From October 23 to 25, 2024, the Collaborative Research Centre 1604, “Production of Migration,” launched in April, brought together migration researchers from all over the world for its international inauguration conference. Lectures, discussions, and working sessions focused on how a reflexive perspective on the production of the meaning of migration in societies—not least through the actor of science—can be further developed and operationalized.
After the opening panel discussion, the first day of the conference began with a section on the production of figures of migration, in which Prof. Dr. Catherine Ramírez from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Prof. Dr. Karen Phalet from the University of Leuven discussed questions, approaches, and observations from the seemingly distant disciplines of cultural studies and social psychology. Moderated by Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass, the discussion focused on the question of how societies create exclusionary inclusion and how this phenomenon can be better understood from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Karen Phalet and Catherine Ramirez in conversation with Christoph Rass (Photos: SFB 1604).
Project presentation on the transfer project
In the afternoon, Annika Heyen, Prof. Dr. Michael Brinkmeier, and Christoph Rass presented the first details of the transfer project, which is dedicated to building a bridge between social practice and scientific examination of the production of migration with the help of VR applications. The idea is to enable digital interventions to produce the representation of “migration” in exhibitions and public space and to redistribute the agency to negotiate such narratives.
From the workshop to the stage. Annika Heyen, Michael Brinkmeier, and Christoph Rass present the SFB 1604 T project. Impressions of the ‘rehearsal’ and the big performance (Photos: Jessica Wehner and Nele Wichert).
On the main stage of the conference, Annika Heyen, coordinator of the T-Project, together with Michael Brinkmeier and Christoph Rass, was able to provide insights into the aims of their work and, at the same time demonstrate in practical terms how migration research, computer science, museums, and civil society actors work together on an interdisciplinary basis to implement the project. Christoph Rass explained the concept of the project and the challenges the team faces in practice. Michael Brinkmeier demonstrated the technical processes behind the visible surfaces and gave a guided tour of the two prototypes; in the case of the transformed Peace Hall module, he even streamed from the VR goggles onto the big screen.
Throughout the conference, Michael Brinkmeier and Thorsten Kirmess, cooperation partners of the SFB from the Institute of Computer Science at UOS, offered conference participants the opportunity to explore the first prototypes of the Place Changer and the Exhibition Builder on the screen or – for the more adventurous – via VR goggles.
Our colleague Lydia Reckers also explored the prototypes using VR glasses. Thorsten Kirmess from the Didactics of Computer Science showed her the controls (photo Jessica Wehner).
For the Place Changer, the Team T project replaced the portraits of the envoys from 1648 with portraits of victims of racist violence since 1945 in the virtual model of the Osnabrück Peace Hall. This change to a place symbolizing a universally conceived peace and a source of identity for Osnabrück as a city of peace was intended to encourage people to reflect on the conditions for peaceful coexistence in the past and present.
The Osnabrück Peace Hall in VR: shown above in its original state with portraits of the envoys to the Peace Congress from 1643 to 1648, and below, after the intervention. The portraits are from Thomas Billstein’s publication “Kein Vergessen” (2020) and were made available to the T-Project by Unrast-Verlag.
For the Exhibition Builder module, a virtual exhibition space was created in two different versions with the support of our external application partner DOMiD (Documentation Center and Museum on Immigration in Germany). Both versions showed the same objects, many of them from the DOMiD exhibition “Much experienced, much achieved – still much to do?”. VR allows the use of the same media content and objects to show two different exhibitions in parallel, each representing different narratives. At the same time, visitors can change the arrangement of the exhibition content at any time and thus introduce their own perspectives into the narrative – creating yet another new exhibition. In this way, narratives about migration and diversity remain contingent and multi-perspective.
Workshop: “Production of figures”
Sub-projects A1, 2, 3, and the T-project collaborate with critical friends Mai-Anh Boger, Catherine Ramirez, Karen Phalet, Han Eckelberg, and Doan Hoang-Dy. Regina Prade recorded the session using graphic recording. (Photos: Annika Heyen)
On the second day of the conference, the participants were divided into a series of parallel workshops in which the sub-projects worked with specifically invited critical friends to develop their concepts and implementation further. The sub-projects A1 (Prof. Dr. Julia Becker), A2 (Prof. Dr. Aladin El-Mafalaani), and A3 (Prof. Dr. Lale Yildirim & Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass) formed a group so that the transfer project could also be discussed, in which the PIs from these three sub-projects of the A-Cluster (Figures of Migration) came together
Karen Phalet from the University of Leuven advises the A1 project (photos Annika Heyen).
Karen Phalet arrived as a critical friend for the A1 project “The Production of ‘Others’: (De)Thematizing Migration-Related Difference“, led by Julia Becker and carried out by Judith Masselmann and Katherina Hildebrand. The discussion with her focused primarily on the conceptualization of the various diversity strategies that take into account knowledge or awareness (or, conversely, ignorance and denial) of existing power relations and should not be limited to the extent to which difference is de-/thematized. Different goals are pursued during the discussion with the (strategic and situation-dependent) use of specific diversity strategies. However, the effect of these can unfold differently between individuals and contrary to the underlying intentions.
Mai-Anh Boger from the University of Koblenz advises the A2 project by Aladin El-Mafaalani and Isabell Diekmann (Photos: Annika Heyen).
With their critical friend Prof. Dr. Mai-Anh Boger from the University of Koblenz, Aladin El-Mafaalani and Isabell Diekmann from the A2 project “The Production of the Discriminated in Antiracist Movements” discussed the categories and figures for the sampling processes for data collection (e.g., activist, politically committed person, etc.) as well as group dynamics and, in connection with this, different roles within collectives, for example about “opinion leaders”, representation in the media, etc. Ethical questions about sampling and the anonymization process played a role here, as well as how the roles of different people in the collectives are related to biographical circumstances. The project members took away from the discussion that they should deal more specifically with the context of German society and reflect more strongly on the fact that the term “activist”, for example, can have a different history and meaning in the national context than elsewhere.
Catherine Ramírez from the University of California, Santa Cruz, advises Project A3 (Photos Annika Heyen).
Catherine Ramírez from the University of California in Santa Cruz advised the A3 project “‘You are guest worker children! Science, school and the production of figures of migration”. The discussion focused on migrantizing terms such as “foreigner children”, “migrant children” or “guest worker children” and their production in educational science discourses from the 1960s to the 2010s. In response to Ahmet Celikten’s and Maik Hoops’ remarks, Catherine Ramírez pointed out that similar discussions and categorization processes, such as those that were and still are conducted in the Federal Republic of Germany, also characterize the US discourse on so-called “Mexicans”, for example – a label that has also been used for generations to migrate people and question their belonging to the society in which they are rooted. With a view to comparable phenomena in the USA, Ramírez recommended incorporating experiences from other societies and the interdisciplinary research dealing with them into the conceptual considerations of the sub-project.
Diane Doan Hoang Dy and Han Eckelberg from the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle advise the T-Project (Photos: Isabell Diekmann).
The discussion of the transfer project focused primarily on the question of how the concepts previously only tested in the project workshop can be brought into the field in such a way that agency is shifted in the sense of “community curating”. The Critical Friends from the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, Diane Doan Hoang Dy and Han Eckelberg, advised that the workshops should consistently adapt to the pace and needs of those who chose to tell their stories in the project to shape the Exhibition Builder and the Place Changer.
Both saw the project’s great strength in the fact that migrant perspectives can be made visible as facets of larger social processes. Thus, the transfer project provides impulses for the renegotiation or production of the multidirectional self-image of a migration society, which is made up of many experiences, memories, and identities.
After the conference and workshops, the SFB 1604 team will return to their work in the sub-projects with many suggestions and valuable tips with a view to the major goal of deciphering the social production of migration as a complexly interpreted social reality.
Der Wissenschaftsblog der Professur für Neueste Geschichte und Historische Migrationsforschung der Universität Osnabrück
