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ABSTRACT
Following the refugee influx of 2015 and 2016, many German higher education organisations (HEOs) responded with support programmes for refugee students. In this context, refugees became formally and discursively differentiated from other international students. During later stages of the programmes, this differentiation became blurred, and discourse surrounding refugee students partly shifted back to framing them as international students, which is also represented in further support programme development. Based on a systems theoretical framework, this paper investigates the shifting organisational discourse on refugee students within the context of functional needs and structural changes at German HEOs. The analysis shows that structural development is strongly related to the way functional needs and ways to address them are constituted by discursive representations. It is based on 25 expert interviews with heads of international offices and first contacts for refugees at eight German HEOs.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. In the context of support programs for refugees, all sampled HEOs established positions in charge of counselling and often also coordinating support programs for refugees. In summary, I refer to those positions as first contacts.
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Jana Berg
Jana Berg is a researcher at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW). She wrote her doctoral thesis in the context of the research project ”WeGe” on access to higher education for refugees in Germany. Her research interests include orginisational responsiveness, science communication, inequality and forced migration studies.