In this presentation, UBC Visiting International Research Student (VIRS) Lukas Baumann analyses housing in the context of forced migration as an affective border space.
Affects and emotions are approached not as individual states, but as relational social practices that produce belonging, difference, and exclusion in everyday life. Drawing on a completed (auto-)ethnographic research project in Austria, Baumann’s paper, “Affective orders of forced migration: (Auto-)Ethnographic insights into affective practices in the accommodation of young refugees in Austria,” shows how negative affects – discomfort, mistrust, fear, aversion, and disgust – operate as ordering forces that generate and stabilize institutional routines while normalising defensive reactions and racialised border logics. It asks how affective practices intertwine institutional, discursive, and colonial logics with mundane interactions in refugee accommodation.
Methodologically, the presentation will demonstrate how combining (auto-)ethnography with psychoanalytic analysis can make accessible what is latent, hard to articulate, and repressed. By examining the researcher’s own affective discomfort (countertransference), Baumann argues that acknowledging one’s affective entanglement in racist conditions is not a methodological problem but an epistemic resource. The presentation will conclude with implications for reflexive professionalisation and pedagogical practice in migration societies.
This lecture is part of Dr. Markus Hallensleben’s cross-listed GMST_V 229/347 and GERN_V 347 courses, in cooperation with UBC’s CMS Narratives Research Group. This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for European Studies.
About the Speaker
Lukas Baumann is currently a VIRS in the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies and a fellow at UBC’s Centre for European Studies. He is a social scientist with a strong interest in psychoanalytic approaches, affect theory and ethnography. He studied sociology, philosophy, social anthropology and social economics in Mainz, Vienna, and Istanbul, and has worked in a wide range of professional settings – including as a social worker supporting refugees, an education manager and a research associate.
In his role as a Senior Scientist at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, he is completing a PhD on affective practices in refugee accommodations.
