NEC-Tech Research Group

When: April 23, 2026, 18.00.-20.00.

Where: Exclusively online

Presentation topic/title: Mind the Gap: The Invisibility of Eastern European Migrants in German Health Data

Guests: Tereza Hendl and Daniel James

Abstract:

In the wake of COVID-19, structural racism has come into sharper focus across Europe, exposing unequal mortality among racialised groups, including migrant workers from Eastern Europe. At the same time, EU anti-discrimination policy has intensified demands for demographic data to monitor inequality. Yet what has been identified as Europe’s data gap raises a pressing question: are established racial and ethnic categories fit to capture the entrenched inequalities structured by Europe’s East–West divide, and what forms of injustice remain invisible when they fail?

Focusing on Germany, we examine ethical-epistemic issues of racial categorisation in a context that officially rejects racial data collection. Instead, Germany relies on proxy categories such as migration background (Migrationshintergrund), defined by parental citizenship at birth. We argue that this institutional colourblindness is normatively consequential: it determines whose disadvantage counts as racialised injustice. Drawing on Annette Martín’s functionalist explication of Charles Mills’s concept of white ignorance, we show how such proxies obscure racialised disadvantage by sustaining epistemic blind spots in public health and policy.

The case of Central and Eastern European (CEE) migrants illustrates the issue. Mills’s notion of “off-whiteness,” introduced in The Racial Contract, is instructive here. Groups such as Slavs have long occupied a “fuzzy” position within white supremacy: racialised as “white but not quite.” This ambiguity reflects Eastern Europe’s semi-peripheral position within overlapping imperial formations. Inter-imperial governance cast Eastern European populations as developmentally deficient Europeans rather than racial outsiders, producing racialisation through conditional inclusion within whiteness, in which belonging could be suspended, denied, or violently revoked. This history helps explain why contemporary data regimes – often organised around binary racial distinctions – fail to register populations whose marginalisation takes the form of graded whiteness. Neither marked as nonwhite nor securely unmarked as white, CEE migrants fall through gaps between categories.

These East–West hierarchies intersect with anti-Black, anti-Roma, and anti-Muslim racism, yet are rarely conceptualised as racialisation in European policy debates. Their invisibility is therefore a structural effect of marginal positioning within whiteness, which allows disadvantage to remain unmarked as racialised. The pandemic made these dynamics stark. Disproportionate COVID-19 risks and exploitation of seasonal workers from Eastern Europe reflected structural inequalities in labour, housing, and health. Yet the absence of context-sensitive racial data limited the capacity to trace these patterns systematically, shaping which vulnerabilities became measurable and which responses followed.

We argue that closing Europe’s racial data gap requires historically grounded, context-sensitive, and fine-grained approaches to racial and ethnic categorisation. Our analysis engages critically with Germany’s National Discrimination and Racism Monitor (NaDiRa), which recognises anti- Slavic racism and documents discrimination affecting Eastern European respondents. While this marks progress, prevailing categories register discrimination without conceptualising the conditional structure of Eastern European off-whiteness or its imperial genealogy. The question is not only what we measure, but whose vulnerability comes to count as racialised injustice. By developing an ethical–epistemic framework attentive to graded racialisation within whiteness, we aim to support more adequate measurement strategies and more effective responses to racialised health inequality in Europe.

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Tereza Hendl is a philosopher working on issues of global health justice (University of Augsburg). Her research examines concerns of oppression, refusal, justice, and solidarity, as well as the ethics and epistemology of health technologies and interventions, and East–West hierarchies of knowledge. Some of her recent work explores European East–West inequalities and their effects on health and well-being, also considering the impacts of Russian and German imperialism on directly affected populations. With Daniel James and Morgan Thompson, she has received the 2025 Charles Mills Prize from the Journal of Applied Philosophy, for their paper on the ethical-epistemic issues in German migration and the collection of racial or ethnic data, and with Olga Burlyuk, Míla O’Sullivan and Aizada Arystanbek, the 2025 Bernard Brodie Prize from the journal Contemporary Security, the 2024 Best Article Prize from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies, and a 2024 Honorable Mention in the Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS), for their paper on (en)countering epistemic imperialism and “Westsplaining”. Tereza Hendl is a member of the Independent Resource Group for Global Health Justice (IRG-GHJ), founder of the Central and Eastern European Feminist Research Network, and one of the founders of the RUTA Association for Central, South-Eastern, and Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasus, Central and Northern Asian Studies in Global Conversation—initiatives that amplify and (re)connect marginalized knowledges and contribute to epistemic reparations.

Daniel James works on classical German philosophy, with particular emphasis on Hegel and Marx, as well as on social philosophy, philosophy of race, and the philosophy of the social sciences. His habilitation project, Racism without Race, advances an account of racism centred on processes of racialisation, drawing on a comparative study of everyday concepts of “race” in Germany and the United States. On this basis, it offers a non-reductive treatment of phenomena such as antisemitism and anti-Eastern European racism. His recent publications include the volume Hegel and Colonialism, co-edited with Franz Knappik, and the article “Folk Concepts of Race, Cross-culturally” (with Leda Berio, Steffen Koch, Alex Wiegmann, and Benedict Kenyah-Damptey).

NEC-TECH is a multi-disciplinary research group hosted by New Europe College, established at the intersection of technology, society, and culture. The group is open to a large variety of perspectives from different disciplines (engineering, data science, anthropology, sociology, philosophy) with the aim to foster dialogue, reflection, and research on the fast-evolving technologies of our times, including social media, smart devices, and artificial intelligence. We evaluate aspects, perspectives, and impact(s) of such technologies in our lives, in our communities, and more generally in our world-views.

This work is supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS/CCCDI – UEFISCDI, project number PN-IV-P8-8.1-PRE-HE-ORG-2023-0055, within PNCDI IV.

Coordinators:
Andreea EȘANU, PhD, NEC Alumna; (non-tenure) Assistant Professor at University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy; Publications & Digitalization Coordinator at NEC

Răzvan NICOLESCU, PhD, NEC-AMEROPA Fellow; Editorial Assistant, University College London

More details about NEC-TECH research group are available on its dedicated webpage.