The research area 'Inclusion and Diversity' deals empirically and theoretically with processes of discrimination, participation, pedagogical professionalisation and organisational development, as well as questions of solidarity and resistance in the context of inequalities in migration societies.

The aim of the research in this area is to improve our knowledge of the mechanisms, the causes and the consequences of exclusion and discrimination in educational settings. One focus is on the study of natio-ethno-cultural boundaries in schools and social spaces and the related experiences of parents and students. Furthermore, the implications of (social) state transformation and neo-liberalisation processes for the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the migration society are investigated. Drawing on theories and concepts of intersectionality, postcolonial and critical race studies as well as critical diversity studies, qualitative multi-level analyses are used to examine the interweaving of social discourses, pedagogical and institutional practices as well as subjectivation processes.

Current research projects focus on the consequences and demands of global refugee migrations on schools and informal educational spaces. On the one hand, a comparative perspective is used to analyse the learning processes that schools undertake in accompanying refugee children and adolescents and in shaping anti-discriminatory pedagogical and institutional practices, especially since the refugee movements of 2015/16. On the other hand, intersectional forms of educational exclusion of refugee children and adolescents at the border of the EU will be analysed from a transnational perspective with a focus on Germany and Turkey. Particular attention will be paid to the contradictory implications of the European Union's anti-racist and border policies, as well as to the logic of global educational governance in (re)producing educational inequalities.

The work in this research area also aims to further develop inclusion and anti-discrimination concepts for a sustainable reduction of discrimination in schools and in the migration society. This includes examining strategies of professionals, schools and civil society to initiate and support diversity-sensitive and anti-discriminatory processes in and by schools. In addition, transnational perspectives on (social) pedagogical professionalism in the context of global refugee migrations will be developed and evaluated in exchange with academics and pedagogical professionals from Germany, Turkey and Greece, in order to make them productive in the sense of an "Engaged Pedagogy Across Borders" for the design of solidary pedagogical practices and educational spaces critical of discrimination.