INIB / ISTA – Sarah Fichtner

Daily life of refugee children

sarah-fichtner-alltag-geflüchteter-kinder-1

From March 2016 to October 2017, I was a senior researcher in the project »Everyday life of young children in accommodation centres for refugees in Berlin«. The aim of the project was to use participatory methods of qualitative social research to gain an insight into the realities of life for refugee children in families who live in emergency and shared accommodation facilities in Berlin and who are not yet of school age. With my research colleague Hoa Mai Trần, I particularly studied the institutional structure and the kind of »community« that children experience in a shared accommodation facility, as well as their interrelated spaces of movement, relationships and agency.

The project was hosted by the Institute for Innovation and Counselling (INIB) of the Protestant University of Applied Sciences Berlin and the Institute for the Situational Approach (ISTA) of the International Academy Berlin for Innovative Pedagogy, Psychology and Economics gGmbH under the direction of Prof. Dr. Anne Wihstutz and Petra Wagner.

Category / Childhood, Flight, Migration
Employer / INIB / ISTA
Funded by / Various foundations.
Time / 2016–2017
Place / Berlin
Fotos / left: ISTA, Guido Borgers;
right: Sarah Fichtner

Publications / further information

/ Project website (in German)

/ Documentation of the final conference »I want a real house« at the Werkstatt der Kulturen, Berlin, 2017. (in German)

/ Sarah Fichtner & Hoa Mai Trần (2020): Lived citizenship between the sandpit and deportation. Young children’s spaces for agency, play and belonging in collective accommodation for refugees. In: Childhood 27 (2), S. 158–172.

/ Sarah Fichtner & Hoa Mai Trần (2019): Handlungs-Spiel-Räume von Kindern in Gemeinschaftsunterkünften. In: Anne Wihstutz (Hrsg.): Zwischen Sandkasten und Abschiebung. Zum Alltag junger Kinder in Unterkünften für Geflüchtete. Opladen: Barbara Budrich, S. 107–134.

/ Sarah Fichtner & Hoa Mai Trần (2018): Ethische Ambivalenzen in der Forschung mit Kindern in Unterkünften für geflüchtete Menschen. In: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung 19 (3), Art. 30.