Families with a statistically ascribed migration background often face challenges in Europe: unemployment issues, low income and the threat of poverty as well as an unequal education system, where children and young people are disadvantaged and consequently, their access to higher education and job perspectives is limited (Liebig 2007, UN 2007, Beicht/Granato 2010, Diefenbach 2010, Ferreira/Pohl 2012).

These families frequently live in urban areas strongly influenced by migration movements, often former workers’ neighbourhoods or characterized by high-rise buildings. These neighbourhoods, where disproportionately high figures of unemployment, families dependent on governmental social benefits and migrant families are found, are - within the context of urban research - described as marginalized. Families living here need to negotiate challenging economic, educational and social conditions.

In our research project (and within the framework of a larger, European research project), we focus on life strategies of families in marginalized urban neighbourhoods in Germany. Migration is frequently a family project (Apitzsch 2006), and family an important resource in dealing with educational, job-related and social challenges. In our theoretical approach, family members are seen as actively dealing and negotiating with societal circumstances and social meanings (cf. Wacquant 2006) and their strategies are analyzed, taking relevant explanation contexts into consideration, which shape each person’s scope of possibilities (Holzkamp 1983). Our research project aims to transcend beyond the deficit-oriented perspective without neglecting the social and societal challenges families with an ascribed migration history have to deal with (Riegel 2004, Riegel/Yildiz 2011).

 An important aspect of the research project is to determine, how families deal with the challenges of a structurally unequal education system and the individual challenges their children may face in the school context and the importance of their positioning in these urban neighbourhoods.

 In this paper we will present analyses from group discussions, each with a family, and ethnographic data, on how families describe and interpret the educational pathways of their children and which life strategies can be observed.

With our research we would like to contribute towards the knowledge about life strategies of families in dealing with the education system, with consequences for local as well as national policies, aiming at improving the broader discourse on migration and education in Europe.  

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