The social implications of legal statuses and determination processes among recent asylum seekers in Germany

Magdalena Suerbaum

- completed -


This project is an ethnographic study of the legal processes, conditions, and statuses encountered by newcomers in Germany. The project examines asylum seekers’ legal trajectories, and how changing legal statuses and conditions have an impact on asylum seekers’ access to resources, services, information and advice. It also investigates asylum seekers’ understandings of these statuses. The aim of the project is to demonstrate relationships between different legal statuses and patterns in social outcomes, as well as asylum seekers’ ability to conduct some form of individual independence, engage in family life, and access jobs, education, training, and housing within the parameters set out by their respective legal statuses. In particular, this project focuses on the experiences of asylum-seeking mothers, and analyses the impact of different legal trajectories on their parenting practices. It further inquires into how legal precarity is entangled with, and affects, notions of motherhood.

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