Dr. Daniel Jerke, M.A.
Researcher

Dr. Daniel Jerke, M.A.
Researcher

E-maildaniel.jerke(at)univie.ac.at

From 2022 to 2026, Daniel Jerke completed his dissertation at the University of Vienna under the supervision of Jannis Panagiotidis. Previously, Jerke did his BA in European Studies with a focus on social sciences at Chemnitz University of Technology, followed by a MA in Migration and Diversity at Kiel University. As a student, Jerke spent one semester respectively at Silesian University in Katowice and Adam Mickewicz University in Poznań. Additionally, he did various placements, e.g. at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw and the street paper “Hempels” in Kiel.

Research interests:

  • emigration from Poland after 1945

  • history and sociology of migration to Austria after 1945

  • history and sociology of migration from Eastern Europe to Canada in the 20th and 21st century

  • interconnection of migration, race and class

Current Research Project:

Prekäre Privilegierung: Polnische Flüchtlinge zwischen Polen, Österreich und Kanada in den 1980er-Jahren [Precariously Privileged: Polish Refugees between Poland, Austria and Canada in the 1980s]

This dissertation argues that the people who left Poland for Austria and Canada in the 1980s were precariously privileged. On the one hand, the Poles were – in both countries – institutionally and discursively privileged by most actors involved in the negotiations over their mobility. Not only were existing definitions advantageously interpreted or even new legal categories created for them in order to facilitate their admission, but the Poles benefited, too, for a long time from a favourable view of politicians and the media. On the other hand, being privileged was for the Polish refugees relative in comparison with migrants from other countries as well as within their own group. Furthermore, the privileges of the Poles were fragile, because they were increasingly questioned by numerous actors over the course of the 1980s.

However, this dissertation shows not only what being precariously privileged meant for Polish refugees in the 1980s, it also reconstructs how this ambivalence came about by analysing the transnational negotiations between Poland, Austria and Canada on the basis of a migration-regime-analysis combined with the concept of refugee voices as well as the theory of forms of capital. After tracing the establishment of the East-West-transit system in the decades following World War Two, the dissertation looks in detail into the refugee movement from Poland to Austria in 1981 and the subsequent reactions to the declaration of martial law by the Polish government. Subsequently, it examines the negotations about Polish mobility in the mid-1980s, before it turns to the dismantlement of the transit system and the entailing reduction in privileges at the end of the decade. The shown entangled history (Verflechtungsgeschichte) is based on numerous written sources from Austria, Canada, Poland and beyond and aims at opening new perspectives on the relationship between privileges and migration in the past and the present.

Publications:

 

 

Book Reviews:

Walking Tours:

  • “Vienna as a Transit Hub for Jewish Refugees and Migrants during the Cold War”, 30.06.2026, as part of the conference “Between Perestroika and the War in Ukraine. Alternative Temporalities in Eastern Europe and Jewish History”

  • “Vienna as a Transit Hub for Refugees during the Cold War”, 30.08.2025, as part of the Central Leadership Program 2025

  • “Vienna as a Transit Hub for Refugees during the Cold War”, 05.06.2025, as part of the RECET Festival of Historical and Social Sciences “Migration and Transformation”