For quite some time now, communities have been facing the challenge of integrating immigrants from other countries into community life and of developing practices for this integration. In view of the current migration developments and the outlook that a growing number of people with flight experiences will be living in the communities for a longer time, the question of their involvement in community life will become more and more important. In research and practice, it has been attempted to subsume questions pertaining to immigrants’ integration into community life under the concept of ‘integration’.

To date, the terminological concept of social inclusion has been hardly applied at all to describe integration processes of immigrants. From the perspective of Social Work science, however, it has great potential because of its extended capacity to describe these processes. With reference to this, the understanding of “inclusion” as developed by the Ilse Arlt Institute for Social Inclusion Research of the St. Pölten UAS – which is “the possibility to use and co-design societal and social processes such as those of production, reproduction, communication, and recreation as the basis for self-determined living” (Ilse Arlt institute for Social Inclusion Research 2013) – is used as the defining framework of this research project.

The leading research question of the project is: “What is the state of community-related practices of inclusion and exclusion with regard to people with displacement experiences in rural regions of Lower Austria?” With reference to the defining framework of inclusion, interesting questions pertain to the experience of inclusion and exclusion practices from the perspective of people with displacement experiences as well as people from the receiving society. The research project places particular emphasis on the Social Work concept of socio-spatial orientation.