“How do people from migrant backgrounds experience belonging in Germany?”

The collaboration with Zeitgeist Labs centres on belonging: How do people from migrant backgrounds experience belonging in Germany? Where is it denied them? What strengthens their participation in society, and what stands in its way?

Zeitgeist Labs is developing new research methods for the project. The underlying question: how do we capture and understand knowledge that matters to society but is almost absent from conventional datasets and public narratives? The idea is simple. Rather than talk about migrant communities, let people say for themselves what their lives are like, what they experience and which perspectives matter to them, especially where those perspectives usually go unheard.

The project uses an anonymous, multilingual qualitative approach in which young people and adults can share their experiences freely and in their own words. The conversations take place in several languages, so they also reach people whose perspectives a German-only study would find considerably harder to capture. Experiences are not reduced to predefined answer categories: each account is analysed systematically and brought together with the others.

The result is a new dataset on how belonging, exclusion and participation in society are actually experienced, and on what fosters or hinders them. Perspectives that are easily overlooked or go unheard become visible and comparable, and available to research, communities and public debate.