The conference is structured around the question how migration history is represented in the public history of European immigration societies and in which ways immigrants are defined and constructed in the dominant national narratives. The conference takes place within the framework of a cooperation between the Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institute for European History and Public Spheres in Vienna and the University of Malmö. The Focus of the empirical research is on labour immigration after the 1960’s. The main sources for the analysis are geography and history textbooks on the one hand and museums or migration exhibitions on the other. Both – textbooks as well as museums/exhibitions – are in this sense interpreted as manifestations of the institutionalised and public memory of a country.

The following research questions are central to the conference:

In which way are the history of (labour) migration as well as the migrants themselves, and their histories collectively remembered and represented in textbooks and museums/migration exhibitions of European immigration countries? In which ways are the migrants written into national memories? Are they constructed as part of the national or European self, or as the outsider/the others? Do these various representations change over time?

Different European countries follow different migration and integration policies. The various migration regimes are also linked to different national self-understandings of being an immigration or a non-immigration country. It is one of the aims of the conference to compare and contrast the work on the Austrian and the Swedish case with research from other European countries. In order to achieve a better basis for comparison and to strengthen the inner coherence of the conference the contributors will pay special attention to the research dimensions gender, family, ethnicity and education/class. The national historical context, also with respect to emigration, is another aspect that will be taken into account.

In his essay ‘The Stranger’ (1944) Alfred Schuetz argued that the stranger, seen from the point of view of an autochthonous population, is a human being without history. The conference and our research on the interconnections of migration, memory and history are in this context also a contribution to make the hi/stories of migrants more clearly visible as part of a shared European past, present and future.