Research Projects

Elastic Borders: Rethinking the Border of the 21st Century (2022-2026)
Funded by the Nomis Foundation, this research project advances a fundamental rethinking of contemporary borders through the concept of elasticity. Taking the case of the EU’s southern external frontiers, an interdisciplinary project team of seven researchers are carrying out a qualitative and multi-sited study to explore the legal, technological, and sociopolitical dimensions of the elastic border in two research units. The first research unit focuses on the horizontal level, offering a bird’s-eye view of the enactment of the EU`s elastic border. The second research unit undertakes a vertical analysis, conducting ethnographic studies of the impacts of the elastic border in three critical nodes of the elastic border in Greece (Samos Island), the Canary Islands (Tenerife), and Tunisia (Medenine). The innovative combination of these two levels enables a comprehensive understanding of the transformation of the EU’s elastic border for a timespan of ten years, 2015 to 2025.​

Infrastructure Space and the Future of Migration Management: The EU Hotspots in the Mediterranean Borderscape (2018-2021)
The research project is funded by the Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS) and carries out  comparative, interdisciplinary and multi-sited exploration of the infrastructure of migration management in the context of the new Hotspot Approach of the EU. The project explores the consequences of EU migration policy in Greece, Italy, Tunisia, Turkey and Libya.

Affective Citizenship: Religion, Migration and Belonging in Europe (2018-2022)
The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and explores the relationship between religious incorporation and belonging with a study on Islam and Alevism in Europe. The project consists of three subprojects, which examine religious recognition processes from the micro, meso and macrolevels in eleven Western European countries, with a special focus on Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
 

Emotion and Affect within the Context of Authoritarian Transformations (2019-2023)
The research project is based in Berlin, where Ayata is an associate member and international cooperation partner of the Research Cluster “1171 Affective Societies” at the Freie Universität Berlin. Bilgin Ayata is a DFG Mercator-Fellow of the SFB 1171 during the second research phase of the Cluster (2019-2023).