Between Hospitality and Inhospitality: The Politics of Migrant Protection in Germany

Zusammenfassung

How can the reception of migrants’ voices into public discourse become established as a norm? How could migrant narratives legitimately contribute to the production of knowledge and meaning in reception countries? Rather than arguing for the necessity to integrate migrant narratives in the public discourse on migration, this chapter takes an ethical-philosophical approach to discuss the process of normalizing their voices and perspectives in the overall deliberation process within the reception society. At stake here is the emergence of an intersubjective relationship between members of the host society and the incoming foreign, with a particular consideration to the latter’s singularity (Fiske, 2016). Indeed, migrants are often confined in discourse to the role of silent and nameless subjects, which impedes the possibility to access the discursive field and fill it with a thus far absent, albeit crucial, narrative on the migratory journey.

Chapter III to VI include findings from data collected in Germany in summer and fall 2016 during in-depth interviews with asylum seekers and refugees. This study was conducted according to the research protocol IRB#16-540, which was approved by the Virginia Tech Institutional Review Board (IRB). See appendices in the annex.