Not only the drowning of numerous refugees in the Mediterranean, the situation of Asian labour migrants in the Gulf States or the daily commutes between Mexico and the south-west of the United States make it clear that never before have so many people worldwide been willing, forced or able to change their place of work or life. Nevertheless, migration is not exclusively a modern phenomenon, but has always been a central determinant in processes of the creation and transformation of society: the history of mankind can indeed be understood as a history of migrations. On the one hand, these migrations constantly create new borders, which have a regulating, controlling and sometimes violently restrictive effect in territorial, ethnic, religious, cultural, social, economic or linguistic terms. At the same time, migration movements and discourses problematise and change these demarcations. Migration phenomena and border demarcations thus produce each other and can be analysed in this reciprocal relationship.

Based on these considerations, the doctoral programme "Migration-Social Border Formations" examines the formation processes of (political, ethnic, cultural, linguistic...) borders in current and historical migration society contexts and asks how this doing border contributes to the formation of migration society subject positions (the 'migrant', the 'native', the 'inclusion educator', the 'smuggler', the 'migration expert'), and under what circumstances it limits the spaces of possibility of those subjects or holds potentials for the transgression of existing migration society orders. The fundamental assumption here is that the borders in question - including, for example, the politically prescribed territorial borders - are not simply 'there', but are discursively and performatively thematised by individual and collective actors at various levels of society, and are thus continuously created anew and differently, contested, redrawn, redefined and can always be experienced materially. These historically and culturally situated practices of border formation are understood in the doctoral programme as an essential moment in the creation of contexts of belonging in migration society and can be analysed as such.

The aim of the doctoral programme is the interdisciplinary investigation of the connection between situated practices of actors (e.g. the human trafficker, the educator, the doctor of an aid organisation, the family that is addressed as a family with a migration background by neighbours and local authorities and addresses itself in this way....), institutions and structures (e.g. the mission station, the church, the border police, the immigration office, the local museum) in the creation of border formations and the constitution of orders of belonging in historical and contemporary migration society constellations. Through a differentiated description and theorisation, the programme analyses these complex but often unquestioned contexts and thus also contributes to the development and reflection of methods in migration research. To this end, the programme integrates already established and nationally and internationally visible research and institutions in the field of migration and border research at the Oldenburg, Göttingen and Osnabrück locations, creating an ideal environment for working on interdisciplinary doctoral projects and thus making a significant contribution to strengthening and further developing a regionally, nationally and internationally significant research focus on migration in Lower Saxony.