The Austrian Academy of Sciences (OEAW) is Austria’s largest non-university research and science institution. It presently has over 770 members and 1,700 employees dedicated to innovative basic research, interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge and the dissemination of new insights with the aim of contributing to progress in science and society as a whole. The members of the Academy engage in interdisciplinary exchange to consider important questions concerning the future, advise on policy and society and inform the general public of important scientific insights. The OEAW operates 27 research institutes in the field of innovative basic research in the arts and humanities and the social and natural sciences. The OEAW has a vibrant community of researchers working on migration in several institutes.
The Institute for Urban and Regional Research (ISR) is one of the leading institutes in migration and integration research. It has a long tradition in this subject reaching back to the early 1980s and has long-term expertise in the structural analysis of international migration, its demographic and societal consequences and the different paths of integration of the migrant population into the Austrian society in general and the urban social setting in particular. The institute has produced a large number of publications on labour migration and East-West migration and since 2015 has increasingly also worked on refugee migration from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. More recently, the focus of the work at the ISR has come to include interethnic relations and individual negotiations of belonging in societies of migration. In addition, cultural and religious diversity have become central issues in the research focusing on migration at the ISR.
