What might the narrative of a "society that holds together" look like? Based on the assumption that the positioning of individuals and groups in society is not only influenced by socio-economic factors but also by narrative self-descriptions, the transfer project collects personal and collective narratives that deal with integrative and disintegrative experiences. The focus of the project is on the so-called "refugee crisis" of 2015/16 and how it was dealt with in municipalities. For a comparative perspective within Germany, narratives are collected both in Jena and in Konstanz. Furthermore, the inclusion of other narratives from Strasbourg raises awareness of the frowardness of political-administrative frameworks and civil society engagement in a transnational perspective. The recorded narratives will be supplemented with narratives of the "Wende" and "Postwende" periods, narratives of discrimination and engagement in cooperation with the Berlin sub-institute and published in excerpts on an internet platform and in other media as text and audio documents.
The transfer project is based on close cooperation with practice partners. They are actively involved in the planning and implementation of the project and act as disseminators in the publication and dissemination of the project results. The project aims to enable people across different milieus, ethnicities and age groups to get involved at a low level and articulate their own experiences in an overarching community narrative. A section in which FGZ researchers analyze and discuss the stories will be placed alongside the narratives in order to pick up on recurring themes, to identify narrative patterns and to deepen them essayistically.
The aim of the project, which serves the transfer dimension "exchange" developed in the FGZ, is to convey the narratives recorded in a manner inspired by qualitative social research and oral history to a broader public (via media, social media, storytelling salons), thus creating an exemplary narrative work of society. The project has an experimental character (what overall picture emerges from the individual narratives?). At the same time, it is intended to be interventionist, as a counter-draft to the tendency towards polarising narrative patterns of the present and as a forum for supra-regional and transnational exchange between practice partners.
In the aftermath of upheavals and crises, the public regularly demands that the narratives of those involved be given resonance. Recognition and narrative are obviously interrelated; both are intended to make visible such divergent experiences and divergent perceptions about which a society must communicate if it is to ensure its cohesion.
Theories of the communal assume that cohesion at the communal level can take on a special quality when citizens actively take care of common issues. The "refugee crisis" brought new forms of such interactions, in which both the long-established and the newly arrived participate. Conflictual forms are to be considered here as well as those of problem-solving cooperation.
The way in which upheavals and crisis-like events will enter the collective memory is constantly renegotiated as part of the public discourse. We see storytelling as an essential part of this process. In the communities, it can contribute to giving permanence to newly emerged forms of interaction, not least by making them presentable to the participants themselves.
The transfer project combines an interest in narrative theory (Which patterns does narrative follow? How do narratives relate to media coverage? To what extent does the integrative effect of narrative emerge as a factor for social cohesion?) with the question of how the events of the long summer of migration have changed communities and continue to do so: Has the "refugee crisis" led to lasting conflicts or, in the course of cooperative crisis management, to stronger cohesion? Which practices and framework conditions in the municipalities were decisive in this?