Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which migrants and refugees experience Germany's language and civic integration program, while negotiating forms new and emergent forms of belonging and identity, which challenge and reimagine imposed and stereotyped notions of the 'integrate able migrant'.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper presents findings from ongoing ethnographic PhD research, investigating the ways in which migrants and refugees in Berlin experience Germany's language and integration programs. Since its inception in 2007, Germany's so-called Integrationsprogramm seeks to equip newcomers with the linguistic and civic knowledge deemed necessary to allow them access to the job and education market. The concept of integration is pervasive in German political and public discourse, and government-funded add campaigns regularly promote their programs alongside images of 'successfully integrated' migrants and refugees. Against this backdrop, migrants and refugees are required to complete rigorous language and civics knowledge courses, which culminate in oral and written examination. Alongside learning German, migrants are taught how to present their personal, national and professional identities through structured and mediated exercise, which can often be limiting and based on stereotype. What emerges from classroom interaction as well as public and political discourse is a notion of an 'integrateable' (and therefore also, unintegrateable) migrant, who adheres to the values and norms of Germany's constitutional democracy, and who actively contributes to culture and economy.

Through analysis of classroom recordings, individual and focus group interviews with integration course participants and teachers, this paper explores the ways in which the notion of the integrateable migrant is constructed in public and institutional discourse, and how migrants and refugees encounter and negotiate stereotypical and imposed identities, often constructing new and emergent self-representations, which break both from their own past experience, as well as from the identities imposed on them.