Bd. 2 Nr. 2 (2018): The Refugee Discourse

According to Agamben, the refugee is a representant of the homo sacer - an individual who marks the self-set borders of a (civil) society: as an excluded individual the refugee represents this border. The refugee as the homo sacer seems to be the foundation for the so-called refugee-discourse. This refugee-discourse increasingly challenges self-understanding discourses of the Western world. Subtextually the refugee-discourse is accompanied by fear of social and national decline. According to the refugee-discourse social and cultural stability of Western societies are precarised - exposed to an increasing stabile instability, caused by refugees. From a discourse analytical point of view, one could say that the refugee-discourse meets neoliberal social policy discourses, neo-national and neo-conservative discourses. The result is a hybrid discourse-mash-up which affects different fields such as social policy, pedagogy and diversity. Social sciences have to face the challenge of this `discourse mash-up´as well as , critically analyse the societal changing processes. Social research has to pose deconstructional questions on

• ranscultural identities in socio-economic contexts,
• the rising of neo-nationalist discourses in the Western world,
• the aggravation of social struggles in the course of contemporary social transformation processes.