Fourth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

This paper explores how refugees integrate into German society and to what extent their integration disrupts traditional theories of cultural assimilation utilizing qualitative data from interviews and online surveys with refugees residing in suburban areas of former East Germany. This paper provides a counterpoint to prevailing scholarship on socio-cultural integration that frequently centers itself in urban areas with large existing immigrant populations. Comparing interview and survey data, this work examines to what extent refugees signal the destabilization of a homogenous German national culture by pioneering their own cosmopolitanized sense of cultural selfhood through consumption of social and digital medias. In viewing the self as a reflexive project whereby an individual engages in a constant construction of identity, this paper will argue that integration is not a top-down process whereby the immigrant is influenced by the host society, but rather that integration is a multifaceted process between the individual, local community, and global media ecosystems. This paper views the construction of cultural identity, particularly in digital spaces, as embedded within broader political structures and reads the cosmopolitan cultural affiliations of refugees as indicative of a political challenge made to Germany’s historic ethno-cultural model of national belonging. In exploring how refugees in diaspora articulate a multifaceted form of cultural identity this paper challenges both expectations of communalist belonging in Germany as well as within the diaspora and argues that due to the fragmenting and cosmopolitanizing forces of globalization nation and culture have become increasingly uncoupled.