BERLIN CHAPTER: House of World Cultures, Berlin
August 12th, 2005
3.00 am – 6.00 pm

Panel Discussion:
The virtual second generation

Second generation Indians are different from their parents and different from the host community. They have been brought up in Germany or Austria, this is their home, their first language is German. But they also feel links to the home of their parents in South Asia. They do not want to decide between their two homes. They want to live their own lives in their own spaces. And they are establishing these spaces. Since the middle of the 90s parties and seminars from and for the second generation have developed. The one or the other has experimented with websites and since 2000 the internet portal www.theinder.net establishes itself as the virtual space for German speaking second generation Indians.
In the symposium it will be discussed in which ways theinder.net establishes a community of second generation South Asians, which links to and images of India it transports and what role virtuality plays in this context. It thus deals with the consequences of moving people and the resulting movement of ideas and images.

Urmila Goel is a researcher in social and cultural anthropology at the University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. Currently, she is working on the research project “The virtual second generation - On the negotiation of ethnicity in the internet by second-generation Indians in Germany”. As a journalist and trainer in civic education she also deals with matters of migration, living in diversity and especially the second generation of migrants.

Respondents: Bijon Chatterji, creator and chief editor of theinder.net, Hannover; Amit Dasgupta Deputy Chief of Mission, Indian Embassy, Berlin - Mareile Paske, Navina Khatib, Thomas Steller, students of Viadrina University, Frankfurt/Oder

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