Center for Integration Studies

The term ‘Integration’, which is controversially discussed in politics and economy, contains different, sometimes contradictory concepts of how society is and should be, who belongs to it, where its borders are, and how the connection between (cultural) belonging, individual performance and social participation can be defined.

As different as the positions may be here, there often still is the reference to migration as a cause for collective self-affirmation with regard to participation, belonging, a cultural-normative self-image, and borders of society. The Center for Integration Studies starts here, and explores the broad field of integration particularly concerning the understandings of society and the processes of socialisation realised in the respective integration discourses and practices.

The ZfI bundles and coordinates research activities in the mentioned subject field while taking into account the structures, practices, and discourses on in- and exclusion, as well as the effects on the socialisation resulting from these. Here, researchers from different disciplines joined in order to bundle research and teaching projects, as well as practice-oriented projects with transfer potential, and to design new projects.

The center is dedicated to the concept that the diverse and complex questions concerning the field of integration can only be answered interdisciplinary, and that only the renunciation of an own social ideal (as a superordinate ideal of the research) opens the view of the research on the dynamics of discursive and practical socialisation that are reflected in the controversy on integration.

The Center for Integration Studies (ZfI) is supported by means of the institutional strategy of the TU Dresden that is financed by the excellence strategy of the federal and state governments.
This measure is co-financed by tax money based on the budget determined by parliamentarians of the Saxon Landtag.