Apr 18, 2019
Visiting scholar from Japan researches integration and municipal participation in Dresden
The city of Dresden attracts international research interest because the tense processes of integration and disintegration can be studied here as if in a real laboratory. Based on this interest, the Japanese sociologist Dr Naoko Okamoto from Nihon University, Tokyo, will be conducting research at the Centre for Integration Studies at TU Dresden for one year. She wants to examine and classify the developments, concepts and measures in the field of municipal integration policy and civil society initiatives. The researcher, who herself worked for several years as a research officer for foreigners' affairs in the city of Kawasaki, is particularly interested in the supportive and obstructive conditions that are relevant for peaceful coexistence between natives and migrants, as well as in the connections between demographic, political, economic and social factors in this process. As an institution of reciprocal research-practice transfer, the Centre for Integration Studies offers ideal conditions for the scientific support of the research project: an interdisciplinary research institution in the field of humanities and social sciences that has been carrying out relevant projects in the field of integration since 2016, initiating dialogues between science, politics and practice with innovative mediation formats as well as conducting basic research in the field of integration.