The Austrian Academy of Sciences (OEAW) is Austria’s largest non-university research and science institution. It presently has over 770 members and 1,700 employees dedicated to innovative basic research, interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge and the dissemination of new insights with the aim of contributing to progress in science and society as a whole. The members of the Academy engage in interdisciplinary exchange to consider important questions concerning the future, advise on policy and society and inform the general public of important scientific insights. They also form commissions in which they examine questions of great relevance to science and society. The OEAW operates 27 research institutes in the field of innovative basic research in the arts and humanities and the social and natural sciences. The OEAW has a vibrant community of researchers working on migration in several institutes.
The Institute for Urban and Regional Research (ISR) cooperates with many of these and actively contributes to the work of the Commission for Migration and Integration Research installed by the Academy to increase interdisciplinary cooperation in migration research, provide fact-based information to the media and political institutions, and promote public dialogue and the exchange of views on migration in Austria.
The Institute for Urban and Regional Research (ISR) is one of the leading institutes in migration and integration research in Austria. It has a long tradition in this subject reaching back to the early 1980s and has long-term expertise in the structural analysis of international migration, its demographic and societal consequences and the different paths of integration of the migrant population into the Austrian society in general and the urban social setting in particular. The institute has produced a large number of publications on labour migration and East-West migration and since 2015 has increasingly also worked on refugee migration from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. More recently, the focus of the work at the ISR has come to include interethnic relations and individual negotiations of belonging in societies of migration. In addition, cultural and religious diversity have become central issues in the research focusing on migration at the ISR. Scholars at ISR are a multidisciplinary team including researchers with expertise in anthropology, digital humanities, economy, geography, literary studies, political sciences, religious studies and sociology. The ISR has vast experience in large projects and international cooperation. This experience includes national as well as EU-funded projects and the active membership in the largest research network on international migration, integration and social cohesion in Europe (IMISCOE) from the very beginning in 2004.
Mag. Dr. Ursula Reeger has been a researcher at the ISR since 1989. She studied geography (spatial research and regional planning) at the University of Vienna and received her PhD in geography in 1999. Her research interests include international migration (European East-West migration, intra-EU mobility, immigration from outside the EU), integration (e. g. on the labour and the housing market), interethnic relations on the local level, attitudes towards migration and their formation, migrant entrepreneurship, urban societal development and governance of migrant inclusion. She has published on these subjects in a wide range of academic journals and books. Due to her participation in several large-scale international research projects she is well embedded into the European scientific community.
MMag. Dr. Astrid Mattes is a postdoctoral researcher at ISR. She studied Political Science and Comparative Religious Studies at the Universities of Vienna (Austria) and Limerick (Ireland). At the ISR, she leads the research project “YouBeOn – Young Believers Online” and works on her habilitation. Previously, she was involved in different research programmes on the mapping of religions in Vienna, the politics of inclusion and exclusion, and religion and transformation in contemporary societies. Her main fields of interest are the governing of diversity in liberal democracies, conviviality in urban spaces, immigrant integration politics, religious pluralism and Islam in Europe.
Mag. Miriam Haselbacher is a doctoral researcher at the ISR. She studied Development Studies at the University of Vienna (Austria) and was previously working at the department of Political Science (University of Vienna) and as a visiting scholar at the Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM). She was involved in the research projects “Taking Sides” and “BordEUr”, where she analysed protests and social movements in the field of migration as well as European bordering practices. In her research, she focuses on the local dimension of asylum and integration policies in both urban and rural regions, inclusion and exclusion in theory and practice as well as societal diversity and change.