Gender-Integration-Gamification

Background: The integration of refugees who have been granted asylum or subsidiary protection in the course of the largest refugee movements since the civil war in Yugoslavia challenges contemporary Austrian society in various ways. Successful integration, however, provides economic, social and cultural opportunities which societies with lower integration capacities do not have. Gender is a key factor for understanding the troubles and conflicts but also the potentials and chances of integration. For one, refugees who immigrated to Austria in the course of the recent refugee movement are, for the most part, young women and men (under 35 years) from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, two thirds of them being male. Moreover, these people are socialized in families and societies which deal with gender issues in different ways and expect different things from their male and female members as compared to Austrian society. Gender roles and identity concepts which are internalized in the course of the socialization process, however, are related to basic notions of social order in which the development of personality and social integration intersect. 
Aims: The project Gender-Integration-Gamification (GIG) wants to understand how processes of integration can be structured by a playful involvement with the topics of gender and identity, framed by a mediated educational setting which uses a gamification approach to smart phone app design. These mediatized activities aim at motivating persons to develop orientations of action prone to integration and to support them in the course of this process. Integration is not conceptualized in terms of assimilation processes in a given social structure (structural integration), but as a form of integration which allows for maintaining one’s own cultural identity (cultural integration). With reference to this concept of integration we intend to develop a virtual learning environment in which a playful involvement into understanding one’s own and other’s concept of masculinity and femininity without urging to take over the genderrelated patterns of a foreign culture (integration as assimilation).