Refugee Migration and Gender Relations

This lecture series focuses on alternating interdependencies between (current) refugee migration and gender relations. The lectures will mainly place emphasis on two Questions: How is gender related to migration and under what circumstances are refugee and mobility practices connotated as male or female? Secondly, how and in what ways are individuals institutionally and socially defined and labeled as ‘refugees’ and/or ‘migrants’? A focus on mutual constitutions of migration and gender relations allows to reconstruct and analyse specific frames of masculinity and femininity in the context of contemporary refugee mobilities. Moreover, research that focuses on the media representations of asylum and migration issues will be looked at, since they tend to reproduce racialized and gendered categories: representations of male or female refugees are being generated, even though they are contested. The lecture series aims to deconstruct these symbolic struggles concerning images of ‘the other’ from both feminist and critical migration research perspectives.