“but also… but... sometimes but very rarely… I have felt that... I am also a foreigner”

Discrimination experiences of highly educated migrants from Central and Eastern Europe in Vienna

Anna-Katharina Draxl and Clara Holzinger

Department of Sociology, University of Vienna, Austria

 

Date: 12 December, 2024 at 1 p.m.

Venue: Meeting room of the Institute for Minority Studies 1097 Budapest, 4 Tóth Kálmán (T/1/40)

 

ZOOM

Meeting ID: 873 0481 2326 / Passcode: 475016

 

Our presentation focuses on subtle forms of discrimination that CEE migrants experience at the labour market in Vienna. A number of recent publications have dealt with the racialization of Eastern Europeans in Western Europe. In our own research, however, racism was rarely explicitly mentioned by our interviewees. While being less confronted with overt discrimination based on skin colour, religion or legal background, our interviewees face rather subtle processes of exclusion. Their experiences of discrimination are often ambiguous and hard to grasp (and admit) for both our research subjects and ourselves as researchers. In order to give particular attention to the interaction of various discrimination mechanisms (especially gendered differences), we apply an intersectional approach and aim to move beyond an ethnic lens and instead consider the embeddedness of migration experiences. For more information on our research group, see: https://inmi.univie.ac.at/