Towards the polysemic fabrication of integration: Relating hegemony-critical theories ‘from above’ and actor-centred approaches ‘from below’
with Prof. Dr. Anna Amelina
16.04.2026, 18:00 CEST, online via Zoom Abstract
The concept of ‘migrant integration’ – a cornerstone in international migration studies – has been subjected to extensive critique and analysis. Against the background of the multiplicity of critiques, the presentation aims to review and consolidate the critique’s central arguments and to develop an outline of the domination-critical, iterative, and constructivist concept of ‘doing integration’. In developing this approach, the presentation reviews and interrelates multiple bodies of literature. With the domination-critical scholarship it reflects the discourse-theoretic, coloniality-sensitive, and Marxist writings on integration governance to identify multiple sites, logics, mechanisms, and realities of integrationist domination. Conversely, with the actor-centred (assimilationist, emplacement, and homemaking) approaches, it provides a typology of (non-)migranticized actors’ collective responses to integrationist domination. Following the observation that the notion of ‘integration’ is characterized by a certain degree of polysemy, the article examines how selected approaches implicitly relate to (non-) migranticized actors’ affirmation of, resistance against, or ignorance of the dominant institutional integration governance.
Prof. Dr. Anna Amelina is a sociologist and Professor of Intercultural Communication at Chemnitz University of Technology. Her research spans critical migration studies, transnational social inequalities, and the politics of gender and citizenship. She developed the doing migration approach, a framework analysing how social practices and discourses construct social realities of "migrant" (Amelina 2021, 2022). Grounded in critical cultural theory and memory studies (UNESCO Chair, 2018–2025), her work systematically interrogates dominant categories of belonging and mobility, most recently through the lens of postsocialist-postcolonial interdependencies.
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