Migration is one of the most striking challenges for societies around the world and an issue of the greatest political relevance. Despite this fact, the current philosophical debate on migration remains largely limited to a normative-empirical exchange on the present refugee situation. In my current research project, I propose an alternative that reaches beyond this focus and aims at a phenomenological examination of the experience of those crossing borders: I wish to pursue and unpack the philosophical intuition that there is a core lived experience accompanying every migration, which is intersubjectively comprehensible and communicable. This experience transgresses subjective reasons to migrate, one’s cultural and social background or one’s particular life-story, even if all these factors can influence its intensity. Against this background, my paper focuses on the question, if gender can be seen as a decisive factor, which renders retrieving such a common experience of migration impossible? As gender is definitely one of the core constituents shaping the current forced migration, and partly also voluntary migration, it has a critical influence on my central question: How does a migration experience change the existential situation of a person regarding her self-perception and her relation to the community in which she lives? Referring to the essential fields of experience: the Visible, the Audible and the Corporeal, I will examine the role, which gender plays in experiencing migration, but also the storytelling transforming this experience. In this respect, my investigation contributes substantially to the current academic migration debate: I engage with the question, who do we speak of, when we address migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers, instead of objectifying and reducing them to numbers to be ‘normatively managed’. Within this framework, determining the significance of gender influence is a key aspect of pursuing a thorough insight into the versatility and commonality of the migration experience.

Theoretical references: Arendt, Spivak, Said, Borren, Gündoğdu.

I am an Assistant Professor in practical and political philosophy at Paderborn University and an associate fellow at the Center for History of Women Philosophers and Scientists. I studied philosophy and education at the University of Lodz, Poland and University of Jyväskylä, Finland. I then completed my PhD studies in Germany, initially at the University of Bonn and subsequently at the Paderborn University. My dissertation examines exercises in political thinking in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt. In my post-doctoral research, I pursue a project, which corresponds with my own biography: a phenomenological study of the migration experience.
In my research and teaching I focus on political philosophy (political action and judgment, migration, political participation) and feminist philosophy (feminist phenomenology, theories of the body, feminist politics).

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