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Aims of IMIS

Society constantly deals with the challenges of migration issues. In the past, the world was shaped by mobility over centuries: countless examples point to how significantly labor and colonial migration, nomadism, educational and vocational movement, human trafficking, flight, forced displacement and/or deportation have impacted demographic issues and the development of labor markets, political systems, cultural identities and/or religious orientations. Migration will continue to be a central social issue with high political influence in the future. This is demonstrated by the current debates on the consequences of the further growth of the world population (which is distributed very unevenly across several regions), with examples including the aging of the societies of the rich 'North,' climate change, the socio-political challenges of migration, and/or the lack of skilled workers for increasingly complex and internationally closely networked 'knowledge societies'.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at Osnabrück University has been interested in the manifold aspects of spatial mobility and its consequences in the past and present. The IMIS' tasks include contributing to interdisciplinary consolidation and networking and to dialogues between science and practice through its basic research, its publications, its public events and the scientific advisory activities of its members. Thanks to its many years of research expertise and an interdisciplinary range that is unique in Germany, IMIS is now a research institute that is known and recognized nationally and internationally. IMIS includes several scientists from various disciplines and research areas:

• Art History
• Education
• Ethnology
• Gender Studies
• Geography
• History
• Language Studies
• Law
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Religious Studies
• Sociology