Abstract
AbstractThis article sets out to highlight present-day anthropological contributions to the field of forced migration and to the current debates on this topic in Europe through the experience of developing an international and interdisciplinary network for the study of refugees based in Vienna, Austria. To this end, this article engages with the grounding facts of the present Central European sociohistorical context and global political trends, grapples with shifting and questionable research funding landscapes such as the focus on “integration,” illustrates some of the main current research challenges, and highlights pressing topics. It concludes proposing a research horizon to counter present strong limitations on forced migration research and steer this research toward a more meaningful direction.
Highlights
This article sets out to highlight present-day anthropological contributions to the field of forced migration and to the current debates on this topic in Europe through the experience of developing an international and interdisciplinary network for the study of refugees based in Vienna, Austria
How can anthropology and anthropologists contribute to the current refugee/migration debate, in Europe? How relevant is anthropology to this topic today? This article engages these questions through our experience in setting up and developing the Refugee Outreach & Research Network (ROR-n), an international and interdisciplinary network for the study of forced migration based in Vienna, Austria
We will set out experiences in dealing with research data while prevailing public moods and opinions have largely been swayed toward the political right, and highlight new research challenges and Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 87 (2020): 89–103 © The Authors doi:10.3167/fcl.2020.012803
Summary
The Refugee Outreach and Research Network, is a cross-institutional, social- science-based cooperative research and public outreach initiative based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (AAS), with partners across various universities and NGOs in Austria, as well as in Northern Italy, Hungary, Southern Germany, Lebanon, and elsewhere It was founded after the summer of 2015, when the authors of this article, all anthropologists based at the AAS’s Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA), called a series of roundtable discussions aiming at setting up a transdisciplinary network for the study of forced migration. Not many researchers were specializing in forced migration in Austria before the summer of 2015, and the few who did rallied mostly from the field of European history and were knowledgeable in one particular group or area, for example, Jewish and Holocaust studies, displacement from the Ex-Yugoslavia, or other salient topics associated with Austrian history For those events, we invited academics specializing in migration in general. As presented below, current global perspectives on Refugee studies in Austria today | 91 refugees and funding opportunities geared toward securitization and the subsumption of refugee studies under migration studies, perhaps especially in Europe, might overlook those particular well-established insights in our discipline
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
