KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Am Marktplatz 2
85072 Eichstätt
JBierwagen@ku.de
Jakob Bierwagen is a fellow of the training group since April 2024 specialized in Practice Theory and Process-Oriented Sociology. Following his bachelor’s degree in ‘Politics and Society’ he also earned his master’s degree in Sociology at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt examining evaluation practices of football-scouts and video-analysts as part of his engagement in the DFG research-project ‘Accounting and Transformative-Effects in Professional Football’ under the direction of Prof. Dr. Schmidt. Drawing from an interdisciplinary background in political science and philosophy, his studies allowed him to apply his training in ethnography and qualitative research to a variety of social phenomena including a focused-ethnography of the Görlitzer Park as a terrain of conflicting practices of space-taking and a focal point of the German discourse on unauthorized migration and drug-related crime. Jakob Bierwagen has worked both within the faculty of Sociological Theory and Process-Oriented Sociology, taking on consecutive teaching assignments as well as participating in the ethnographical colloquium under the direction of Prof. Dr. Robert Schmidt and Prof. Dr. Angelika Treiber.
Dis-/Placings of Border - Ethnographic explorations in the context of the ‘Belarus Route’
In September of 2023 different aspects of the German discourse on irregular migration were localized in the southern border region of Brandenburg, in discussions about stationary border controls near Frankfurt/Oder and Roggosen as a viable and potentially generalizable solution to the increased influx of migrants via the new Western Balkan Route. While these crossings have not (yet) developed the same symbolic power as the chaotic scenes on Lampedusa or the infamous ‘Jungle of Callais’, the developments at the German Polish border, because of their diffuse locality, allow for a new perspective on the agency of migrants embodying borders through their involvement in practices such as capture, appropriation, participation and exclusion of, in or from specific places. In the context of my dissertation, I seek to ethnographically inquire into these diverse practices through which borders are placed and displaced in the everyday lives of the actors involved in their enforcement, contestation and study. Following the practices and narratives emanating from different reception facilities in Brandenburg – as nodal points of my research – borders are analysed as the interrelation of places characterized through asylum seekers narrativization of their migration history as well as their daily navigation of the asylum process in Germany. This framework has emerged out of the ‘Belarus Route’ crystallizing as a shared experience among my field contacts from Somalian, Sudanese and Afghani origin. Specific placings along this route like the situated experience of Mogadishu or the infamous ‘jungle’ between the Belarusian Polish border contextualize and integrate into the practices revolving around the reception facilities. This relationality also allows for a reflexive criticism of implications of ‘the route’ regarding its finality and linearity as it is not only characterised by violent pushbacks and rerouting but also as a continuous struggle elongated through the challenges of the German border and asylum regime. Based on those ethnographic explorations my dissertation aims at an elaboration of the inherent political and conflictual dimension of placings of border through a praxeological lens, while critically reflecting on the ethnographer’s complicity in fixing migration as a sociological category and relying in his fieldwork on asylum seekers concentration and vulnerability.