Discursive Constructions of Professional Identities. Talking to immigrant academics in Germany.

Schmidt, Eva (Primary Chief Investigator)
Möllering, Martina (Primary Chief Investigator)

Faculty of Arts

Project: Research

Status	Finished
Effective start/end date	13/12/13 → 8/12/17

Access Project

Despite increasing skills shortages in fields such as engineering (e.g. The Association of German Engineers VDI 2016), the knowledge and qualifications of highly skilled migrants seem to have lost significance on the German labour market (Flam 2007: 118). Experiences of immigrant graduates in the context of their ‘insufficient incorporation’ (Nohl,Schittenhelm & Schmidtke 2014: 4) into the German labour market have been subject torecent studies (e.g. Nohl, Ofner & Thomsen 2007; Ofner 2011; Henkelmann 2012; Nohl,Schittenhelm, Schmidtke & Weiß 2014; Jacoby 2011), but more research is required on how participation in professional communities is assessed by migrant graduates in the context oftheir de-skilling. Through examining how ideas on professional participation and agency are verbalised in interviews, the study at hand addresses this desideratum.