UAS Researcher Explores how a Successful Coexistence of Refugees and Austrians Can Be Achieved

Photo: FH St. Pölten

Katharina Auer-Voigtländer is a researcher of the Ilse Arlt Institute for Social Inclusion Research at the St. Pölten UAS where she also heads the Department of Social Sciences. For her dissertation she investigated how victims of forced migration arrive in Europe.

Previously, there had been hardly any empirical insights into the life circumstances and coping strategies of grown-ups who migrated as refugees.

• A unique feature of Auer-Voigtländer’s work is that she gave affected person themselves a chance to speak – something that previous research in this field failed to do.

The arrival in a new sociocultural context represents a concrete biographical phase. Auer-Voigtländer examined various strategies of arriving and defined four types in this context.