BIGSSS Graduate Receives OLB Foundation Dissertation Award

from left to right: Karin Katerbau, Chair of the OLB Foundation, Jessica Nuske, Dr. Emanuel Deutschmann and Dr. Christoph Dollinger as well as Prof. Dr. Jürgen Mittelstraß, Chair of the Jury (photos: OLB/Hibbeler) ,

 

April 4, 2019

“If you have spent five years working on a project, you are grateful when the result receives a positive response. All the more so when this happens outside the academic sphere, as with the OLB Foundation Prize,” says Dr. Emanuel Deutschmann. For his Phd thesis on cross-border mobility, the graduate of the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), a joint institution of Jacobs University Bremen and the University of Bremen, was awarded the special dissertation prize of the ‘Oldenburgische Landesbank’ AG (OLB) Foundation. The prize is endowed with 5,000 euros.

, Visibly delighted: Dr. Emanuel Deutschmann receives the special dissertation prize of the ‘Oldenburgische Landesbank’ AG (OLB) Foundation (photo: OLB)

Deutschmann, who now teaches at the Institute for Sociology at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, lived in South America for one year at the age of 16. “This personal experience has sparked my interest to understand how we can be mobile across national borders and what happens to us when we do so. How does mobility change our view of the world and where does it lead to from a collective point of view? The doctoral thesis gave me the opportunity to examine this question systematically,” he explains.

“Mapping the Transnational World: Towards a Comparative Sociology of Regional Integration” is the title of his excellent work. In it, Deutschmann examines the global network structure of eight forms of cross-border mobility (asylum-seeking, flight, migration, tourism and student exchange) and communication (Facebook contacts, telephone conversations, remittances, transfer of money by migrants to home countries) over the period from 1960 to 2010. It shows that all these forms of transnational activity take place predominantly within and not between world regions.

The OLB Foundation of the ‘Oldenburgische Landesbank’ celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. Its science prize honors six outstanding scientific papers with a total of 22,000 euros. On the occasion of the tenth call for tender since the year 2000, two additional special prizes totaling 10,000 euros were awarded for excellent works dealing with the challenges of digitization.

, Photo: Prof. Dr. Arvid Kappas