Minerva Fast Track Research Group Migration, Identity and Blackness in Europe (MIB)

Head: Johanna von Seggern-Lukate
 

Introduction
Identity, Embodiment and Racialization in the Migration Context
Organizing African Identities in Germany: Movements, Migrations, and Public Positioning in the Diaspora
What's Next?

The MIB (Migration, Identity and Blackness in Europe) Minerva Fast Track Group examines how identity and modes of identification are formed and transformed in the context of migration, with a particular focus on migration from the African continent to Europe. The MIB Research Group was located at the MPI for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (06/2023–05/2025) before moving to the MPI for Human Development in June 2025. 

Introduction

The MIB ("Migration, Identity and Blackness in Europe") Research Group takes as its starting point a core theoretical premise, namely, that Blackness in contemporary Europe is not a stable or pre-given category, but one that is actively produced, contested, and transformed through the intersecting processes of migration, racialization, and diaspora formation. This premise raises several questions: What is this "Black" in "Black identity"? Who identifies as Black? And who is identified as Black by others? In addressing these questions, the group takes a social psychological lens, extending the cognitive and intergroup dynamics of social identity theory and social categorization theory to include the embodied dimensions of racialization (Moffitt et al., 2025). The critical intervention into the study of social identities rests upon the assertion that racial categorization is not simply a mental process of sorting people into groups but a process of reading bodies (incl. skin colour, hair texture, body shape) in relation to other bodies within historically structured social fields (Lukate, 2025). Over the past three years, the group has developed this argument across three interconnected lines of research:

1. Identity transformation and racialization at the level of the individual subject;
2. Collective organization and knowledge production in Black and African diaspora organizations; and
3. Reflexive and methodological interventions around the study of migration, identity and Blackness in Europe.

Key References

Identity, Embodiment and Racialization in the Migration Context

The group's main project explores how African migrants in Germany undergo processes of social and personal identity transformation as they encounter and are subjected to ethnic and racial identity categorization processes in Europe. While research shows that African migrants in the UK and US frequently co-construct a racialized social identity as Black, which subsumes, or swallows, other meaningful aspects of their identity, the group's research suggests that the German context is less prescriptive with regards to ethnic and racial identity categories (Lukate, 2019, 2025). This then raises interesting questions regarding the transformation of personal and social identities in the context of migration.

Crucially, international migration is a particularly revealing site for observing how processes of categorization and identification unfold in institutional and everyday encounters. Legal and social categories including age, race, or the salience of ethnicity often differ between migrants' countries of origin and receiving states in terms of their historical genesis, bureaucratic form, and socio-political relevance (Bialas et al., 2025). Ethnic-racial categorization is thus a highly context-dependent process, and the same person can be read and categorized differently depending on the social and geographic context in which an encounter takes place (Lukate, 2023). That category membership is not fixed but situationally negotiated is further demonstrated by research showing how Black and mixed-race women who were born and raised in England and Germany, respectively, actively change and adapt their self-presentation (through hair styling) as they move from one place to another, engaging in a different performance of identity in response to shifting social expectations and racializing gazes (Lukate & Foster, 2023). Expanding this line of research, the registered interview study "Becoming Black?" (Lukate, 2025) asked: Do people who migrate from countries in Africa to Germany identify as Black? And if so, how do they make sense of Blackness and the process of "becoming Black" in Germany?

An important methodological contribution of this qualitative research project concerns the relationship between measurement format and identity expression (Figure 1). When interview participants were asked to select ethnic-racial self-positions from a list provided at the end of the interview, the majority ticked "African" followed by "Black," which points towards the salience of continental over racialized identification (see Figure 2). However, during the preceding interview, almost no participant used Black as a self-descriptor when speaking about their lives and migration experiences. Furthermore, when given an open response field following the closed questionnaire, many participants again reframed their identity in ethnic (e.g., Yoruba) and national (e.g., Nigerian) terms. These differential ways of locating and describing oneself suggest that Black operates as a recognized yet institutionally imposed category that African migrants can acknowledge without inhabiting it as a primary or active, in the sense that they would describe themselves in these terms without being prompted, self-description. Hence, closed formats produce a form of categorical compliance, while open formats allow for or restore the full complexity of ethnic-racial self-understandings that Black, African, and African diasporic people in Germany have available. This finding carries significant implications for research using ethnic-racial identity categories, demonstrating that the instrument of inquiry (e.g. open-ended interview, free form box, forced-choice questionnaire) is never neutral and that what is measured depends fundamentally on the way and mode in which the question is asked.  

Key References

Organizing African Identities in Germany: Movements, Migrations, and Public Positioning in the Diaspora

The group's second research strand focused on migrant and diaspora organizations and was led by Madeline Bass, who was employed as a postdoctoral researcher. In a one-year study combining archival research, ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews, she explored how African migrant organizations position themselves in the public sphere and what this strategic positioning (as "Black," "African" or otherwise) reveals about the relationship between African identity, race, and racialization. In doing so, the project examined how these organizations function as sites where personal histories meet and are shaped by public discourses, migration policy, and concerns over belonging. Crucially, the project understands organizations not merely as service providers or advocacy bodies but as structural formations through which African migrants make strategic and collective decisions about how to present themselves to the public. The project was informed by a commitment to "give back"—through time, knowledge, networks, or material support—to the communities and individuals involved in the research as an ethical practice of long-term fieldwork, especially in the field of migration studies (Amr et al., 2024). Theoretically, the project was informed by Stuart Hall's thinking on diaspora as constituted through difference and movement (Bass, 2025) and by theorizing disciplinary refusal as a mode of knowledge production that pushes back against the institutional and epistemic boundaries that constrain how African migrant life is studied and understood (Bass, 2026). Data analysis is ongoing, with publications expected in the coming year.  

Madeline Bass left the group in February 2026, after securing a permanent position as Akademische Rätin with Natasha A. Kelly, Professor for Global African Arts at the University of Bayreuth. 

Key References

Collaborations and Methodological Interventions

Researching race and racism in Europe raises urgent epistemological and ethical questions about how knowledge is produced, by whom, and under what conditions. However, in Europe, social scientific research on "race" has been slow to reckon with the ways in which researchers are themselves embedded in the racialized and gendered structures they study, and how this shapes what can and cannot be known (Moffitt et al., 2025). The MIB Research Group directly addresses these epistemological and ethical questions through collaborations and different yet interconnected methodological interventions.

First, researching and producing knowledge on race and Blackness in the German context requires careful attention to questions about language and translation. Most foundational texts on Blackness—on its emancipatory potential, its collective meanings, its function as a resource for self-determination in predominately White societies—are written in English, tied into the afterlives of enslavement, colonialism, and empire, and the specific epistemological and socio-political conditions of the location from which they were written (Lukate, 2024). Thus, the group actively grapples with the following questions: What can and cannot be said about "race" in Germany? What is lost in translation? And what can be expressed in English (or another language) that the German language has no words for? 

Next, researching "race" and Blackness requires paying attention to the risk of reproducing the very racializing logic the research sets out to study by re-racializing participants in the research process. This points towards the fact that this line of research is deeply implicated in seeing, requiring, in turn, a reflexive approach to seeing what frames our seeing. In researching African migrants, this frame is about racialization and recruitment practices that, often unreflectively, rely on researchers or research assistants visually identifying potential participants as Black or "African"-presenting. However, in aiming to work with migrants from all countries on the African continent, this reveals a visibility dilemma where some migrants are more legible as having migrated from Africa because their appearance conforms more to racialized expectations of what an African migrant looks like than others, such as Indian South African migrants or White South African migrants. Yet relying exclusively on snowball sampling and community-based recruitment strategies—so that recruitment would not engage in visual identification of potential participants—ultimately proved extremely difficult and time-consuming (Lukate, 2025) and may ultimately not be a sustainable research practice.

And finally, a third line of inquiry concerns the affective and practical challenges of conducting fieldwork on race and gender as researchers who are themselves racialized and gendered subjects. In collaboration with Anaïs Ménard's Otto-Hahn Research Group "Gender, Migration and Social Mobility Among West African Women in Europe" (MPI for Social Anthropology, Halle), the MIB Research Group has developed different strategies around disclosure and exposure as fundamental to navigating vulnerability in the research and writing process (Ménard et al., 2026). This line of inquiry is further extended by the Frontiers in Sociology research topic Academic Knowledge Production on Race and Racism: Reflections on Methodological Challenges (co-edited by Christine Barwick-Gross, Christy Kulz, and Johanna Lukate) that brings together an interdisciplinary array of contributions, which each in their own right examine how methodological choices shape what can and cannot be known about racialized experiences, with a particular focus on epistemic reflexivity and the re/production of racial categories through research practice.

Key References

Innovation and Impact on the Field of Social Psychology

Identity—who we are, and how we are identified by others—is one of the oldest questions in human thought. Psychology has approached this question by locating it in mental processes: how people categorize themselves and others, determine group membership, and negotiate recognition and belonging. However, this cognitive framing has by and large abstracted identity from the body. The MIB Research Group's theoretical intervention is to bring the body back into social identity research and to study how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others as a matter of strategic and agentic self-presentation, perception, and interpersonal encounters. Notably, these three processes become particularly visible, and consequential, in the context of migration. 

What's Next?

1. Expand qualitative findings on how "Black" becomes differentially significant to migrants from countries in Africa via a survey to
   a. systematically test the effect of the timing of ethnic-racial self-positionings on migrants' talk about their identity and migration experience, and
   b. explore how ethnic-racial self-positioning factors into measures of psychological well-being and mental health such as sense of belonging, marginalization, and general well-being.
2. Explore the significance of and collective meaning-making processes around "Black" and "African" for Black, African, and African diasporic people in Europe via focus groups (Phase I in Germany; Phase II collaborative expansion to France, Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, and Poland).