Latest posts by Hans Blokland (see all)
- New Fellow: Antonia Acosta Schultze - October 16, 2025
- Social Science Works awarded Integration Prize 2025 by the state capital Potsdam. - September 23, 2025
- The Loneliness of Germans and their Refugees - August 29, 2025
On September 21, SSW was awarded the 2025 Integration Prize of the State Capital Potsdam in the “Project Idea” category for its “Conversations with Newcomers” project. This year’s theme was “Sharing stories; broadening perspectives together.”
Project description
Although newcomers have been living among us for years, citizens, politicians, and decision-makers often have little idea about these people’s personal backgrounds. This not only leads to loneliness, misunderstandings, and hostility, but also makes integration unnecessarily difficult and means that the measures designed to facilitate it are less effective than they could be. To gain more insight into their backgrounds, we conducted a large number of in-depth interviews with newcomers. We asked many questions: Why did these people come, what was their life like before, what are their expectations, what do they want to achieve in Germany, what experiences have they had so far, what problems do they face, and what solutions do they see for these problems? The names of the participants have been changed, as have some place names. The interviews were conducted in German, English, Farsi, Arabic, and French and are published in German and English with the consent of the participants: click here for the German interviews and here for the English ones. In November 2023, Hans Blokland also published the book “Migrationspolitik auf der Flucht” (Migration Policy on the Run) with Transcript Verlag in Bielefeld. In this book, the interviews are evaluated, quantitative data is presented, and policy recommendations are formulated.
Impact
We hope that the interviews will give readers a better understanding of the background to migration and integration. The interviews are published in various languages on our website and brought to the attention of citizens via social media. The number of views per interview ranges from around 200 to 5,000. We also have many readers in countries such as the United States, England, France, Italy, and Spain. In Serbia, a theater group even wrote a play based on one of the interviews, which is still reaching people today.
Commitment
The interviews were conducted by interns and other volunteers in six different languages with admirable commitment and empathy. Differences in cultural, religious, or social backgrounds were overcome without any major problems. The following colleagues deserve special mention: Laila Keeling, Sahba Salehi, Anjali Zyla, Nadia Lejaille, Isabel Romijnders, Marwa Farraj, Eline Sap, Noelle Wendling, Yasmine Benyoussef, and Genevieve Soucek. The mutual cooperation and solidarity between these Iranians, French, Dutch, Americans, Algerians, and Germans with immigrant backgrounds was exciting, inspiring, and heartwarming. It’s actually not that complicated to live and work together.
