The Migration Process

 

Petra herself is no stranger to migration, she is a German who moved to New Zealand in 1996 where she successfully gained three qualifications from Massey and then on to Australia in 2003. So it is little wonder that when she chose her PhD topic she selected something she had herself experienced, ‘The Experiences of German Migrants to New Zealand and Australia throughout their Migration Process’.

 

Growing up in Germany she spent a great deal of her childhood and youth in nature and being a competitive fencer, even making it into the junior national team at one stage. After living for a couple of years in the former West Germany, she decided to migrate to NZ. On arrival she studied horticulture and worked in nurseries for a couple of years , this however wasn’t a fulfilling time, so she decided she wanted to know how people & societies work.

 

That’s where her study of psychology started and has now led her to not only be a keynote speaker at a recent 17-nation conference on migration in Geneva and be invited to participate in the Theo Murphy High Flyers Think Tank conducted by the Australian Academy of Science, but also being a research associate with the Bushfire CRC & the University of Western Australia, a research fellow at Massey University’s and GNS Science’s Joint Centre for Disaster Research (NZ), an international associate at the Centre for Applied Cross-Cultural Research, and a research associate at the Oceans Institute at the University of Western Australia.

 

In her PhD she explored how migrants experience the emigration and migration process by accompanying 17 participants for two years. Petra went back to Germany and lived with them in their homes for a week, observing and interviewing them. After that, they wrote diaries for her, capturing their immediate experience. Petra believes "Empowering migrants creates a win-win situation for both the migrants and the country of destination because it counteracts migrants returning home or moving on”.

 

Throughout her studies, she has been awarded numerous scholarships and fellowships including the TEC Top Achievers Doctoral Scholarship, the Ryoichi Sasakawa Doctoral Young Leaders Scholarship, and the NZVCC laude McCarthy Fellowship. Petra is now a Research Associate at the University of Western Australia studying preparedness for bush fires. However, she is looking for new job opportunities that allow her to continue making a difference in the area of migration and ecological qualitative research on adaptation and resilience to major challenges.

 

To find out more about Petra or to read her abstract http://home.arcor.de/petra.buergelt/bin/abstract.pdf