1 Introduction

When considering that the city is migration (Yildiz, 2011) and stating that migration is no longer a marginal issue but is accepted as a defining aspect of the future of urban societies (Terkessidis, 2019), a new field for doing migration studies opens up: it becomes necessary to look at local institutions and their agenda on migration as places that co-produce the migration society. Among the institutions now becoming the centre of attention when looking at the impact of migration are the spaces and places in charge of cultural offers. Institutionalised presentations of cultures, like those in museums and theatres and at festivals, are some of the most visible representations of urban societies. These institutions are central actors in the negotiations of the ideas and interests of a diverse population and are currently reacting to demographic changes and dealing with issues related to migration in their exhibitions and on their stages. Nevertheless, while many European societies have become migration societies, cultural institutions still find themselves in a long and cumbersome adaptation to this fact – not only in public presentations but in the whole institutional texture – from guiding narratives to staff composition (see Chaps. 5 and 8 in this volume). This chapter takes a closer look at this process of change in cultural institutions in the two German cities of Osnabrück and Dresden.

When approaching the arts and cultural institutions from the perspective of migration research, it is important to reflect on the knowledge that is generated on this relatively new subject of research. This challenges us to consider how we, as researchers, are situated within this production of knowledge and how we and the academic institutions in which we work are entangled with the cultural institutions being researched. In this contribution, we ask how we should research cultural institutions in societies that undergo considerable change due to migration. How to study cultural institutions is a question not only of methods but also of perspective. To examine this more closely, we apply a reflexive perspective on the knowledge that we produce. We argue for the importance of making the production of knowledge itself the object of study when we conduct critical migration research, following the reflexive turn in migration studies (Braun et al., 2018). With migration being an inherent and strongly influential part of German society, the responsibility of cultural institutions to take up this fact become obvious and their role as spaces for negotiating local identities and belonging is amplified (Kaschuba, 2011). That said, these institutions and local administrations become objects of investigation in the sense of “de-migranticised” migration research (Dahinden, 2016; see also Bojadžijev & Römhild, 2014) that de-centres the migrant subject and, instead, turns its focus on broader societal institutions. This brings with it new challenges. In attempting to understand the impact that migration has on institutions, we try to unravel how change is promoted or hindered within the latter’s structures. In so doing, we reflect on the possibilities which we have as researchers to observe issues related to the migration society in cultural institutions – or, in some cases, to influence the process of change ourselves.

Especially since the crisis of the European and German border regimes in 2015–2016, knowledge production on (forced) migration has been a focus of German public research funders (Braun et al., 2018). The Federal Ministry of Research and Education, which funded our project, explicitly emphasises migration-induced cultural and institutional change as an attempt to understand the mid- and long-term impacts of migration on German society as a whole (BMBF, 2020). With its focus on institutions – and not first and foremost on the migrant subject – this funding scheme connects to the perspective of the de-migranticisation of migration research (Nieswand, 2016). Within this funding scheme, cooperation with practice partners, such as city administrations and local institutions, was an important factor for applications. For both case studies and in reference to the de-migranticisation approach, we initiated collaborations early on with major public theatres, museums and municipal cultural administrations as practice partners.

To understand change within cultural institutions, it is necessary to look at the political context in which they have been operating since the 1970s, when the notion of “Culture for Everyone”Footnote 1 came up in local cultural politics in West Germany (Föhl & Pröbstle, 2020). This notion was accompanied by a movement towards cultural politics that emphasised more democratic and active participation of the local society. One long-term effect of this was the development of pedagogical departments and outreach programmes in these institutions, especially for youngsters and the working class. Much less common were strategies that involved foundational institutional change, nor did they systematically include the population that had immigrated to Germany and their locally raised offspring. Until 1990, Dresden was part of the German Democratic Republic where the notion of “Culture for Everyone” was practiced in programmes and formats (Mandel, 2021). This included free entrance to cultural institutions and a broad notion of culture that included the reception of, for example, theatres and museums, as well as the support of individual and collective cultural activities. Long-term partnerships between cultural institutions and also kindergartens, schools and production sites sustained the idea of an equitable access to culture. However, cultural production was in favour of the socialist state ideology, programmatically enhanced by the “Bitterfelder Weg” in 1959, which enabled playwrites to participate in the production sites with direct contact with the working class (Mandel, 2021). At a federal level, it was only around the turn of the millennium, when the government introduced a paradigm shift towards the political acceptance of Germany as a “country of immigration”, that migration increasingly became a subject in local and national cultural politics at large (Bayer, 2018; Wonisch, 2012). This intensified in the mid-2010s when museums, theatres and, especially, their cultural education programmes became more concerned with migrant populations, notably refugees (Micossé-Aikins & Sharifi, 2016; Tinius, 2019).

The representation of migration in cultural institutions is becoming an instructive subject for migration research due to the roles and functions which these institutions fulfil in society. Cultural institutions are not solely buildings that people walk into for education or entertainment. As “stages” for discourses and performances of specific narratives, they shape the way we think about the past, the present and the future, about art and society, about ourselves and our fellow human beings (see, e.g., Baur, 2013; Bennett, 1995; Levitt, 2015; Macdonald, 2002). Museums and theatres are prisms wherein to observe societal transformation and changes in public representations of national identities long imagined as homogeneous. These institutions can make visible the transcultural and transnational lives not only of migrants but of all inhabitants of the cities around them (Macdonald, 2003). This also applies to other institutionalised cultural events in the form of festivals, crafts markets, parades or concerts which present national folklore. Although the essentialisation of culture in these spectacular representations is a matter of broad (academic) critique, they have become important events for performing a city’s cultural diversity and for observing the changes to an ever-more-diverse population (Knecht, 2010).

When analysing change in cultural institutions, we turn our research focus from the migrant subject to structural obstacles and conditions. In taking in Donna Haraway’s (1988) heuristic perspective of “situated knowledge”, we follow her call for a rejection of objectivity in the research process. For her, knowledge is situated in a certain time (historically) and in a certain place – and it changes with social change. Knowledge is situated in terms of values, belief systems and cultural differences. Haraway thus describes knowledge production as linked to individuals and their bodily experiences, a perspective that she borrows from the feminist research tradition (Haraway, 1988). As Gillian Rose (1997, p. 306) phrases it: “The need to situate knowledge is based on the argument that the sort of knowledge made depends on who its makers are”. This perspective demands a permanent reflection on one’s position as a scholar and the deconstruction of objectified bodies of knowledge (Haraway, 1988). This relates to our embodied, racialised and engendered position as researchers. It also relates to the position of a critical observer, which ranges from a powerless view from the outside to a rather engaging and welcoming view from the inside. This positionality also resonates with the circumstances of being part of an institution and thereby restricted to a certain institutional loyalty. This said, a situated and embodied critical knowledge represents a counter-design to a knowledge that claims absolute validity for itself.

Starting from these methodological considerations, we unravel (some) of the relations in which both our research and we, as researchers, are situated. We do this with a focus on the process of gaining access to our fields to show how the partially contradictory processes of becoming embedded in and being excluded from the institutions have developed. In the next section, we describe the institutional and local contexts in which our research was set. Using examples from our fieldwork, we then analyse some characteristics of cultural institutions and administrations and describe how these affected our access to them. Finally, we interpret how the different entry points to the fields influenced the knowledge – on the representations of social change – which we were able to produce through our research.

2 Situating Our Research

In Osnabrück, the focus of the research has been on the municipal cultural administration and the city’s cultural politics regarding migration. Osnabrück is the third-largest city in the northern federal state of Lower Saxony and has 165,000 inhabitants. The city constitutes an exception to the prolongated institutional change described above. In 1976, the above-mentioned new trends in cultural politics motivated the municipal council in Osnabrück to agree on the first local cultural development plan in West Germany (Sliwka, 2011). This plan defined the work of the public cultural institutions but also described how the city should support inhabitants who were considered as “Others” – meaning the so-called guest-workers as well as Roma and Sinti – in their “cultural self-expression” (kulturelle Selbstdarstellung) (Stadt Osnabrück, 1979, p. 27). In the cultural plan, this was further outlined by describing the possibility for the city to facilitate festivals presenting food, dance and other folklore to the broader population. The official partner in our research project was the municipal cultural office under whose jurisdiction we directly collaborated with the local Museum Quarter and the so-called Office for Peace Culture. These departments within the cultural administration are independently managed. The Office for Peace Culture coordinates projects including active citizens, civil society organisations and migrant self-organisations with a focus on memorial cultures, international and intercultural festivals and collaboration with religious communities. The notion of Osnabrück as the “City of Peace” is a dominant narrative in the work of the cultural administration, going back to when the city, together with neighbouring Münster, hosted the negotiations for the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The Office is “acting as mediator between politics and the administration on one side and the civil society players on the other” (Stadt Osnabrück, n.d.). The second research focus was the local Museum Quarter which consists of the Museum of Cultural History and Felix-Nussbaum-House.

Dresden, with its more than 550,000 inhabitants, is the capital of the Free State of Saxony and prides itself on being a “City of Culture” (Stadt Dresden, n.d.). It is known for its several museums of national and international renown and, with nine institutions of tertiary education within the city, collaboration between public institutions and university researchers is not uncommon. Furthermore, what made the city of Dresden especially interesting for our research also posed a challenge. Briefly summarised, Saxony is one of the strongholds of the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the city is home to the right-wing protest movement known as PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamizisation of the Occident – Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes) on the one hand and a vibrant alternative scene on the other, Dresden has been described as a “torn” (Vorländer, 2016) and a “polarised” city (Greschke et al., 2020). In this context, discourses on migration and cultural politics have become proxies for deeper-lying conflicts on belonging, politics and (urban) society that keep dividing Dresden along fault-lines that pop up in debates on various topics (Greschke et al., 2020). These conflicts are present in everyday life and also have an impact on the work of the city’s cultural institutions, especially those of high profile, like the museum in which our research was conducted.

Concerning the research in both Osnabrück and Dresden, senior personnel from the institutions had agreed on the collaboration and signed a declaration of consent sealing the liaison; however, the local contexts led to different developments for our respective case studies and thus affected the various positionalities that are described below. In the following section, we describe the moments when we entered the institutions where we conducted our research; firstly, however, we consider what this positionality involves at a theoretical level.

3 Getting In

By shifting our focus to access to the institutions with which we have been working, we recognise the importance of the networks and histories in which we, as university scholars, are entangled and the previous work of colleagues in which our work is embedded. This is a twofold process. Focusing on how we accessed the field is insightful, as the obstacles arising tell us much about the actors in the field, their power relations and their local entanglements (see also Schwell, 2018). At the same time, this focus forces us to reflect upon our academic background as well as our positionality and pre-knowledge concerning both the local contexts and the institutions we wish to research, the possibility of engaging in deep and meaningful research cooperation with them and, eventually, the kinds of knowledge on migration and social change which we can produce through such cooperation. Regarding universities, Sara Ahmed (2012) has shown how important it is to reflect on which bodies are anticipated in the institution and which are not considered the norm – we find her ideas on institutional inclusion and exclusion valuable for our own work.

In Germany, large and publicly funded cultural institutions, to a certain degree, function like government agencies: they are organised in hierarchical structures and depend on long-term budget planning – and their work is restricted by a lot of red tape. When dealing with them, it can therefore be helpful to make use of research on bureaucracies, political organisations and government agencies, as organisational sociology does. As Alexandra Schwell (2018) points out, ethnographies of bureaucracies and public institutions enable deep insights into everyday practices, discourses and assemblages of these places, whose idiosyncrasies cannot be fully captured by only looking at governmental structures, organisational charts or official documents. However, gaining ethnographic access to these bureaucratic organisations can be tricky – Schwell describes them as inaccessible places (2018, p. 126). In what follows, we argue that several of the characteristics which Schwell uses to describe bureaucracies as inaccessible places can also be attributed to cultural institutions and can help us to analyse how they influence the kinds of knowledge which we produce in our research. Inaccessible places are specific material places; places that are hard to enter, not only because of their material shape but because of the underlying ideology affecting them. Schwell’s categorisation fits with theatres, municipal buildings and museums, though not solely because they are often located in prestigious, architecturally dominant buildings that were constructed to materialise ideology into “bricks and mortar” (Levitt, 2015, p. 3). While these institutions are in part public buildings, the parts “behind the scenes” (Macdonald, 2002), where much of the actual work is taking place, are not accessible without a previous appointment and unrestricted access is usually only possible for those who work there. Previously made agreements are therefore necessary to conduct research, not only for ethical reasons but also to make it possible to physically access the field sites.

Our collaboration with the cultural administration in Osnabrück could build on a long-established trust with the university’s Institute for Migration and Intercultural Studies (IMIS), not least based on numerous personal connections and career continuities between the university and the local public service.Footnote 2 The IMIS serves as a relevant partner for the city’s cultural strategy, in which culture and the local creative industry are set as location factors for Osnabrück (Stadt Osnabrück, 2020). In Osnabrück, it was possible to swiftly obtain close contact with central and leading personnel from within the cultural administration, which made it possible to access the internal workings of the department as well as the department’s workings on representing migration diversity within the larger frame of the general city administration. The researcher’s participation in meetings, her presence on site and her close collaboration with some city employees was based on a previously signed joint letter of intent and informal agreements between the researcher and the interlocutors – to a large extent, people in leading positions. The research would entail participant observation in the Office for Peace Culture and participation in several internal meetings – with the municipal administration or with partners from the civil society. However, the researcher was also invited to accompany the employees to informal events. One interlocutor invited the researcher to join her for a lunch workout for municipal employees because, as she argued, the researcher as a working mother probably did not have much time for sports. This friendly informality became symptomatic of the relationship of the researcher with the members of the administration in Osnabrück; the connections developed through the work began to determine the progression of the research. Since meetings within a city’s administration are generally not public and all participants have clearly assigned roles in the organisation, the researcher was dependent on the gatekeepers to invite and bring her along but this often happened unsolicited. Even at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring and autumn of 2020 and the subsequent lock-down, with its conversion of all meetings to online formats, the researcher was continuously invited to internal online meetings in the cultural administration. Being a white recent migrant and non-native German speaker positioned the researcher outside the usual workforce of the administration, allowing her to obtain the role of an active participant observer; thus asking basic informative questions about the institutions, their function and their history was not out of place.

In Dresden, the institutional and personal connections between the IMIS and the project partner, a large public museum, were less close: it was only built on an advisory council function of one of the IMIS project leaders for an exhibition on migration within the museum.Footnote 3 The research thus did not benefit from being conducted on institutional home turf and the researcher found himself in a less accentuated position at the partner institution. Being positioned as a male, white junior scholar with a non-migratory West German biography, accessing the museum meant not only studying-up but also being confronted with the institutional history of the German Democratic Republic and the specific local context of Dresden.

In the museum, access to the field proved to require more formalities. In a meeting that involved him, a senior researcher from the IMIS team and two high-level museum representatives, it was agreed that the researcher would join a team working on an upcoming exhibition at the museum as a part-time research assistant. This decision was presumably based on the researcher’s previous practical experience as a junior curator, during which he had curated an exhibition on a similar topic. While at first sight facilitating his access to the inner structures and work of the museum, this decision revealed an early barrier with regards to access to the museum. For insurance reasons and to be allocated his office keys, the agreement needed to be formalised and the researcher had to sign a contract with the museum that was legally similar to an internship contract. Setting this up took the personnel department some time, which delayed the starting date of the on-site research by several weeks. The researcher was then provided with a desk in a shared office in the museum’s semi-basement, which turned out to be two floors away from the people in higher positions into whose work he had expected to gain insights. The keys to the office, again for insurance reasons, were to be picked up from and returned to the museum’s reception desk at the beginning and end of each workday, underlining the physical inaccessibility to the site without a formal contract. This impression of physical inaccessibility was further reinforced by the museum’s representative architecture – the “bricks and mortar” described by Peggy Levitt (2015, p. 3). In this specific museum in Dresden, this combines neo-classical and Bauhaus elements and deserves to be called ‘towering’ or even ‘overwhelming’, with grand open spaces in the public section but small and cramped corridors and offices behind the locked doors to the administrative complex. In combination, the physical inaccessibility of the site, his location in a shared semi-basement office and the impressive architecture constantly reminded the researcher that he was examining a prestigious institution – which played a part in his subjectively felt positionality as a junior scholar with still relatively limited experience in museum work.

Whereas the researcher in Osnabrück was able to informally access the Office for Peace Culture, the research in Dresden commanded formalisation. In signing a formal contract, the researcher was able to circumnavigate the physical layer of inaccessibility and, in turn, became situated within the organisation. However, this led to an asymmetry of power which is characteristic of inaccessible places and strongly influences our positionality. This asymmetry is related to the thematic focus of cultural institutions and administrations: they are fields that, at least in our case, are close to the researchers and their profession and careers. This is true both in museums, where art-historians, historians and ethnologists work, as well as in cultural administrations, where many employees hold academic degrees in the humanities or social sciences. The research conducted can be described as “studying sideways” (Hannerz, 2006) or even “studying up” (Gusterson, 1997; Nader, 1972): academics researching the work of other academics with similar backgrounds in equivalent or higher positions as themselves. In the specific case at the museum in Dresden, this asymmetrical power relation was reinforced by two factors: firstly, the fact that a young researcher with professional experience of working in a museum was studying one of the most prestigious German museums, with the potential informants in part coming from the same discipline but being his senior in both age and experience as well as in academic degree and title (namely holding doctorates and/or professorships). For the researcher, the subjective experience of asymmetry was further enhanced by the fact that the potential informants were influential people in professional networks who might become relevant to the researcher’s future career. The second factor was that the researcher was positioned low within the internal structural hierarchy by taking on the role of a part-time research assistant with an internship-like contract in order to gain access to the field. In Osnabrück, although also studying up and sideways, this was not experienced as a great obstacle due to the fact that the researcher had a strong institutional affiliation in the city through the university – especially through being an employee of the IMIS – and also because the researcher did not have to be placed within the hierarchy of the cultural administration but could work more independently than was the case in Dresden. In what follows, we show how these positions had an impact on the knowledge we could gain on changes within the institutions.

4 Being There

Our various points of entry to the fields led to different experiences of “being there” and thus to different types of knowledge. However, our positionality in relation to the institutions with which we were working was not the only factor which had an impact on the insights we obtained. These were also influenced by the shape of the institutions themselves – and not least the fact that their reactions to the local societies in which they are embedded is different in the two cities. In Osnabrück, the Office for Peace Culture and the local museum are commissioned to work with the active civil society locally, especially including so-called migrant self-organisations and people promoting cultural and religious diversity in and around the city. Through the Museum Quarter and the Office for Peace Culture, the local cultural administration is approachable by the citizens and in dialogue with the latter’s communities. According to the self-description given on its website, the museum in Dresden also aims to engage with the local civil society and sees itself as a place in which cultural and social change can be observed and discussed – and, in many areas, this description fits. At the same time, however, its politics and actions are the results of negotiation processes between different actors (individual and institutional), both within and outside the museum, who have differing ideas of how far this engagement and openness to discussion should go.

The researcher in Osnabrück was accepted by the gatekeepers at an individual level, which meant that she was personally invited to internal meetings. Attending these meetings gave her access to information not available to the public and made it possible for her to obtain a deeper understanding of the negotiations within the organisational structures of the institution (Brown et al., 2017). It made it possible to understand how issues of migration are imagined and negotiated in the cultural administration. At the same time, the researcher still depends on the gatekeeper’s judgement on what she finds important which, in Osnabrück, also meant not being invited to meetings that the gatekeeper did not find representative of her work. This did not mean that important players in the local cultural scene were all supportive of the influence the IMIS has. A cultural politician was reflecting on this, arguing that

coming from parts of the conservatives, not only conservatives but also those who, so to speak, in the eighties built up this idea of the peace city and who then, so to speak, are against the detached university discourses of othering or something. Who see there rather a kind of demarcation line.

As is visible below, observing open disagreements within the institution can help us to understand which changes do take place and which changes are deemed needless.

Becoming an official part of the organisation, as was the case at the museum in Dresden, offers different kinds of opportunity: during his work at the museum, the researcher had his own internal museum email account. This allowed him to receive invitations to internal events and meetings that were sent to all employees and to attend these meetings without asking for permission. One such meeting dealt with a controversial topic – namely the public and internal debates about the fact that the museum decided to invite a group of activists and artists of colour to contribute to an (at the time already finished) exhibition on racism during its planning process. The museum had received both praise for including the group, as well as criticism for planning the exhibition with an all-white curatorial team and for not including people of colour from the beginning. The meeting developed into a discussion and revealed conflict between museum staff on how far museums should go when giving up their claim to professional expertise in favour of the subjective experiences of others and becoming a space for participation and discourse (for a general discussion on this, see Baur, 2020). Here, it was possible to observe an internal conflict that revealed structural frictions and conflicting positions in a way that would probably not have been revealed in or perceived via interviews alone. One of the higher-ranking museum officials, for instance, who would publicly support the idea that museums should become more open and develop into discursive spaces, strongly advocated at the meeting that museum workers are highly trained professionals whose hegemonic position in certain discourses and exhibition topics should not easily be dismissed in favour of “lay people”. Thus the meeting exposed the differences between internally and publicly expressed positions for at least a certain number of the museum staff, while others strongly opposed the view and spoke in favour of more “progressive” understandings of museum work.

When we reflect upon these differences and upon the kind of information on the everyday workings of the institutions which is normally willingly revealed to us, it is important to keep in mind the settings in which cultural institutions operate. Here, we can refer to the bureaucratic nature of them as part of the public sector and the discursive setting in which they are entangled. When conducting research in cultural institutions on sensitive topics like migration and diversity, we need to be aware of the pitfalls of political (or personal) interests that might (wittingly or unwittingly) play a part when decisions are made at the higher organisational levels. Cultural institutions nowadays more often tackle topics like the representation of migration, racism or sexuality in their programmes and many of their employees are sincerely interested in and knowledgeable on these topics. Nevertheless, because of the institutions’ bureaucratic nature, this does not automatically make them tolerate outsiders’ insights behind the scenes; in behaving thus, they risk public criticism or scrutiny. As described above, German cultural institutions are highly dependent on public funding, the allocation of which is a politically charged topic. As large public institutions, museums and theatres are also major actors in (and often the subject of) public debates on different social and political topics. At the same time, they strategically situate themselves in these discourses in a socially acceptable position, not least in order to receive public funding. The institutions are therefore often closely monitored by the media and the public and can be prone to attempts to control the type and level of publicity which they create with regards to potentially “polarizing” topics like migration. Leading figures in cultural institutions are well aware of which expectations they need to meet and which positions they are expected to hold if they wish to be considered as “keeping up with the times”, no matter whether or not they share them. These (local) discursive surroundings need to be taken into consideration when discussing how museums increasingly open up and discuss the origins of their collections and the ways in which they produce and communicate knowledge (see also Gable, 2013).

This also leads us to reflect on which kind of knowledge we won from the work in the Office of Peace Culture and the museum in Dresden. Whereas, in Osnabrück, the knowledge we gained made it possible to understand how migrant citizens and people seen as representing the city’s cultural and religious diversity are included in the local cultural programme on a practical, daily basis, in Dresden we mainly won meta-level information on how knowledge of migration is debated in a major state museum, on who is part of this knowledge production process and whose position is challenged or excluded. The growing (partially public) engagement with their role in knowledge production described above, especially for museums with an ethnographic or cultural-historical focus, is partly rooted in the inward-looking nature of their respective disciplines but, more often than not, outside influences, such as activist critiques, debates about representation or new, ambitious leadership coming in have been the starting point of these processes of change (see Macdonald, 2010; see also Chap. 8 in this volume). This is also the case with the rising political debate about the colonial history of European museum collections and claims for restitution. However, a growing self-awareness does not mean that museums are inherently open to publicly discussing what is happening behind the scenes at a deeper level. This means that insider knowledge comprehends how decisions are taken rather than how an exhibition or collection came into being or what the museum’s stand is on certain topics. Decision-making structures reveal much about where power lies within an institution. At the same time, looking at how decisions are made can sometimes remind us that, despite the importance of structures, plans and resolutions, the final authority on important decisions is often still held by a single individual.

According to Schwell (2018), different layers of knowledge and secrecy are also the result of the bureaucratic nature of inaccessible places which further contributes to the asymmetry of power between the researcher and the field. In our case, this asymmetry of power is twofold and our situatedness concerning the institutions we research is thus ambiguous. Firstly, as external researchers, we can easily be perceived as “evaluators” and experts on the topic of migration who intend to identify and reveal deficiencies and shortcomings in the institutional work – especially when we research a topic like change. As Eric Gable (2013) points out, researchers need to remember that building a rapport and meaningful relationships is hard when you are perceived as (or understand yourself to be) a critic. We observed, especially in Dresden, that this positionality influenced the willingness of informants to open up to the researcher about possible deficiencies within the institutions. This becomes more apparent when we think about the fact that we are gathering material about their jobs. As Hugh Gusterson observed, we conduct research “where ethnographic access is by permission of people with careers at stake” (1997, p. 116). At the same time, the informants’ positionality influences their ability to share their knowledge with us; who we choose or get the chance to speak to (see Hannerz, 2003) affects both the kind of knowledge we can produce from that conversation and also our future positionality within the institution and may thus enhance or limit our choice of possible future interviewees.

To give two examples from the fieldwork in Dresden: a mid-level museum employee had shown great interest in collaborating with the researcher in one-on-one conversations. Later, however, the employee had to backtrack on the jointly developed ideas for the cooperation after consulting with a superior and, instead, suggested a looser and shorter collaboration which would have also directly involved this senior colleague. The idea eventually fizzled out, partly due to scheduling problems but also because the researcher felt that the involvement of the superior was an attempt to monitor the conversations between him and the museum employee. As if to illustrate common reports by ethnographers about their most easily accessible informants, the person the most willing to engage in a regular conversation and also openly talk about shortcomings within the museum was an “outsider” – i.e., someone whose position was not funded by the museum itself and who had been situated outside the museum’s strict organisational hierarchy, reporting directly only to the upper management level. The person was thus able to collaborate with the researcher more freely and without feeling the need to consult a superior. The less-constrained conversations with this person allowed the researcher access to inside knowledge about internal museum processes. However, this came at the risk of giving the impression that the researcher would deliberately bypass the hierarchy, thus putting the rapport with other possible informants at risk.

In Osnabrück, in contrast, the researcher could closely follow the employees of the Office for Peace Culture and thereby gained insights into how new initiatives were started, initiatives that would accommodate the diversity of the city’s residents. The overall access to the cultural administration in the city made two things possible in particular: to follow some employees’ work inside the cultural administration and to initiate a project with the local museum in transdisciplinary cooperation shortly after the research had begun. As further explained below, the latter became crucial when the pandemic and 2020 lockdown made it difficult to initiate new collaborative projects. The changes that the Office for Peace Culture was embroiled in can be exemplified by the following observations from the field: “This is an event for a true culture of peace”, an employee of the Office for Peace Culture exclaimed at a meeting with representatives of local mosque communities. The meeting took place in the community room of a mosque in an industrial area of Osnabrück. There, some members of the local Muslim communities met to organise a joint public Iftar, wishing to serve a Ramadan meal for around 1000 people at a central square in the city. The communities themselves had initiated the Iftar and, for the employees of the Office as well as for the mosque communities, it was important that the latter took charge of the organisation, albeit with the support of the city administration. The planning of the Iftar was presented to the researcher by the employee as a potential way to understand how new projects develop and how collaborations between the Office and civil society took place. Being able to attend such meetings made it possible to understand how new initiatives are instigated in the city and how they are placed within the city’s dominant narratives of a “peace culture”. The collaboration with the mosque communities served to show the understanding which lies behind certain organisational structures. At the second meeting in a neighbouring mosque, one of the Muslim organisers emphasised that the public Iftar was particularly important for him as a native-born citizen of Osnabrück. The researcher’s positioning at these meetings made it possible to gain knowledge of how the municipal cultural administration reacts to the surrounding society and how the locals interpret the events. It shows how the Office for Peace Culture includes Muslims in the city narrative based on the Peace of Westphalia – a peace treaty that ended religious conflicts – and how the native Muslims wish to use the event in the future to show their belonging to the city as non-migrants. Not only was this presented to the local Muslim communities as a seminal event in the city but the team from the Office for Peace Culture also highlighted the project positively at an internal meeting in the cultural administration.Footnote 4

The second example from Osnabrück makes visible the impact of initial contacts between researchers and people active in the field of interest and how it affects the knowledge that can be gained once there. Even before taking up the position in the project, the local researcher was contacted by a new employee in the local cultural administration in Osnabrück, an employee who, while still a student at the IMIS, was hired by the administration on a temporary contract with a mandate to increase the diversity in the Museum Quarter’s programme. This contact led to the joint initiation of a Master’s seminar at the IMIS in which students were to become part of a greater participatory exhibition in the museum. Within this project, members of local activist groups and migrant self-organisations were making the lives of the diverse populations of Osnabrück more visible by telling stories of migration, diversity, “Othering” experiences and civil engagement. The collaboration was initiated in early 2020 but the lockdown, due to Covid-19, heavily interfered in the seminar and exhibition plans. With the pandemic, the already existing networks became even more important than before and, for both the museum employee and the researcher, it was clear that realising such a project was a now-or-never opportunity – both their positions were short-term, lasting 1.5–2 years. With both also being female early-stage professionals, the collaboration became a place of mutual support. The development of a close relationship between the researcher and her partner in the museum made this collaboration possible and was mutually beneficial for their work. For the museum employee, the collaboration was valuable because of the researcher’s experience with practical and theoretical knowledge on museums and her easy access to Master’s students who could participate in the exhibition project. For the researcher, it created proximity to the field at a time when such relations had become extremely difficult and, through the transdisciplinary intervention, it became possible to examine representations of migration in a cultural institution on equal terms with those involved. Being part of this collaborative project made it possible to gain insights into how the reaction of institutions to migration is entangled with the direct participation of local organisations and private individuals and how deeply the execution of these projects depends on those involved in them.

5 Conclusion

In this chapter, we looked at knowledge production in cultural institutions as an important field in migration studies. We adopted a “de-migranticised” perspective for researching cultural institutions and argue that the knowledge produced is situational, as it is influenced by our positionality not only within society but also within the institutions we are researching. This positionality determines who we can speak to and about what and from which societal position we are speaking – and, thus, the layers of knowledge which we can approach. It is shaped by the interrelations between ourselves, the people working in the institutions and the institutions themselves as collective bureaucratic entities. Our first encounters as researchers with these bureaucratic institutions are strongly affected by these interrelations and we therefore argue for the importance of careful initial preparation and an early start to the reflexive process.

The positionality obtained in Dresden made it possible to observe actors in the institution from a more-distant perspective than initially planned and to obtain a bodily understanding of the difficulties in gaining access to the monumental construction that is this museum. Despite the official agreement, access to the museum as a research site was not straightforward. A closer exchange with museum employees on the topic could not be realised as intended by the researchers and some museum employees, partly due to the strict internal hierarchical order. How access was (not) achieved in Dresden reminds us that granting access to researchers is an act of trust on the part of the object of research – here the employees of the museum. This requires a preparedness to suspend control – at least to some extent – and to open-up internal processes to external viewers, possibly affecting the public image of the institution as well as the self-image – something that is not exactly inherent in the bureaucratic nature of large cultural institutions.

The importance of locality when entering these institutions as research fields becomes visible in this chapter. When researching change in cultural institutions in the migration society, the local entanglement of the researcher – or the lack thereof – is of great importance. The closeness and distance to the fields existing outside the single researcher were felt bodily in both places, with the researcher being either physically included or excluded from the everyday work life in the institutions. The history of institutional entanglement on which research builds is important for how researchers can position themselves and how they are positioned by the authorities in the field. We have shown how mutual trust at an institutional level creates the foundation for a confident collaboration and a smooth entry into an otherwise, in many ways, inaccessible field. A trust-based point of departure is especially important regarding the subject of institutional change in migration societies. Due to the sensitivity of the subject, institutions are very aware of every move concerning how they engage with the subject of migration and the presence of external social researchers can be perceived as an audit or as a person engaging with the institution in a joint project of change. These processes are challenging but, from our point of view, they are necessary and worth it, because research on cultural institutions can produce valuable knowledge of how migration is negotiated and represented both “on the stage” and “behind the scenes” of publicly funded, powerful actors who are influencing local and national discourses.