Migrants'emplacement at the micro-level: Restaurants as the contact zones

The project sets to investigate migrants’ social emplacement at the micro-level by focusing on restaurants as institutions that have, throughout time, sustained various groups of migrants. Migrants are a vital aspect of »ethnic« restaurants either as employers, owners, or workers. In Slovenia, these restaurants are pockets of »superdiversity« in an otherwise less diverse society. As such they are ideal places for research on the »sociability of emplacement« (Glick Schiller and Çaglar 2016). The main research question of this project is: How does a restaurant, conceptualized as a micro-level institution at the intersecting array of local and global networks, emplace migrants into the new environment? Employing Doreen Massey’s concept of a “meeting place” and Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone” the project team sets out to analyze the economic, social, political, and cultural aspects of the process within which migrants meet, work, socialize, and negotiate with non-migrants through work and life in the restaurant and ultimately also become members of the local networks. This approach departs significantly from the prevailing research in migration studies, which examines the inclusion of migrants using the concepts of integration or/and assimilation into one bounded, container-like nation-state and results in an inadequate understanding of social inclusion/exclusion at the micro-level of the society.

Through a fine-grained fieldwork study, the project will 

a) highlight the mechanisms behind the emplacement of migrants at a level of concrete and everyday experience, 

b) contribute to a more nuanced debate on migrants' inclusion, and critically address the prevailing concepts of inclusion (e.g., integration), and

c) reflect on the importance of migrant work for the catering industry in general and specifically in Slovenia. 

Moreover, it will provide a timely account of the temporal dynamics of the micro-level emplacement processes, thus underlining the impact of broader structural conditions and the role of migrants' agency in the process.

Main activities:

• 1. colloquium: Ethnic economies

  Lecture by Mladen Zobec (Graz University) titled »Ethnic economies in Yugoslav socialism: Albanian migrants' sweet shops and bakeries in Slovenia«

  Date: 17 February 2025

• 2. colloquium: Conviviality

  Online conversation with Gracia Ting Deng (PhD, Brandeis University), the author of »Chinese Espresso: Contested Race & Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy« (Princeton University Press, 2024),

  Date: 16 April 2025