TY - ABST
T1 - Refugee stories about war and welfare
AU - Brøndum, Tine
N1 - Conference code: 18
PY - 2021/12/3
Y1 - 2021/12/3
N2 - In this paper, I wish to present initial findings and analytical work from a recently begun research project based on narrative interviews with refugees that have arrived in Denmark since the 1990’ies. Refugee stories about war and welfare, is a subproject of the collective project Refugee Stories and Stories about refugees (led by Trine Øland). In the subproject, I aim to explore differing refugee experiences across age and gender, as well as across time and location in Denmark, in order to answer the overall question of, how differing groups of refugees make meaning of their life before and after their flight, and how Danish welfare system encounters are integrated into these narratives.The interviews will be structured by explorative questions making room for the refugees’ own reflections and storytelling. The sub-project seeks to identify common stories, structures and performances of the collective refugee and post-refugee condition relating to for instance homeland nostalgia and silence (Sa'di & Abu-Lughod 2007, Eastmond 2007), as well as the experience of being cast as a refugee in the Danish integration and educational system in shifting policy environments. An initial thesis of the project is that this casting and process of becoming a refugee entails complex processes of marginalization in which the individuals’ meetings with welfare and immigration services structure and produce norms that the refugees has to oblige and accommodate to.In the paper, I will furthermore address the scientific challenges of ethics, power and language when working with refugees with sensitive or even traumatizing stories. Doing this, the paper discuss the impact of the differing contexts in relation to silences and voids in the stories told in relation to the known effects that experiences of violence and displacement can have on peoples’ story-telling (Eastmond 2007).An important part of the future work will be the synthesizing analysis of the collective project. In this we focus on the relations between the refugee’s stories and political and administrative stories about refugees from Danish welfare workers. An overall ambition of the project is therefore to abstract new theoretical understandings of the mediated connections between types of subject-based experiences from a marginalized group in society, and types of institutional welfare state-based narratives.
AB - In this paper, I wish to present initial findings and analytical work from a recently begun research project based on narrative interviews with refugees that have arrived in Denmark since the 1990’ies. Refugee stories about war and welfare, is a subproject of the collective project Refugee Stories and Stories about refugees (led by Trine Øland). In the subproject, I aim to explore differing refugee experiences across age and gender, as well as across time and location in Denmark, in order to answer the overall question of, how differing groups of refugees make meaning of their life before and after their flight, and how Danish welfare system encounters are integrated into these narratives.The interviews will be structured by explorative questions making room for the refugees’ own reflections and storytelling. The sub-project seeks to identify common stories, structures and performances of the collective refugee and post-refugee condition relating to for instance homeland nostalgia and silence (Sa'di & Abu-Lughod 2007, Eastmond 2007), as well as the experience of being cast as a refugee in the Danish integration and educational system in shifting policy environments. An initial thesis of the project is that this casting and process of becoming a refugee entails complex processes of marginalization in which the individuals’ meetings with welfare and immigration services structure and produce norms that the refugees has to oblige and accommodate to.In the paper, I will furthermore address the scientific challenges of ethics, power and language when working with refugees with sensitive or even traumatizing stories. Doing this, the paper discuss the impact of the differing contexts in relation to silences and voids in the stories told in relation to the known effects that experiences of violence and displacement can have on peoples’ story-telling (Eastmond 2007).An important part of the future work will be the synthesizing analysis of the collective project. In this we focus on the relations between the refugee’s stories and political and administrative stories about refugees from Danish welfare workers. An overall ambition of the project is therefore to abstract new theoretical understandings of the mediated connections between types of subject-based experiences from a marginalized group in society, and types of institutional welfare state-based narratives.
UR - https://aftercrises.edu.oulu.fi/workshops/the-marginalized-migrant-integration-and-well-being-of-adult-migrants-unab
M3 - Conference abstract for conference
T2 - The 18th Society for the Study of Ethnic Relations and International Migration
Y2 - 2 December 2021 through 3 December 2021
ER -