The project takes its cue from a situation in 2015, when 31.00 of the 1,2 million refugee and asylum seekers in Europe, found their way to Norway. During a few autumn months, more than 5500 asylum seekers crossed the northernmost Schengen border in Europe, from Russia to a small municipality in the northernmost region in Norway. The municipality have approximately 10 000 inhabitants. During one month, 3000 refugees arrived. The unpredictable flow of immigrants posed a huge challenge to the local government. Nor the national or the local authorities were prepared. From a local point of view, the responses from national authorities were inadequate, causing chaos and tension. Local authorities and local communities were drawn into a collective effort to take care of the new arrivals. Many of those who came are now settled in small rural places in the northern periphery. Fluctuations of refugees are likely to have great impact on small, rural societies as a whole, socially, economically and politically. New inhabitants may halt population decline and increase municipal economic space of action. This might represent new opportunities for challenged communities. An important aim of this project is to investigate how refugees are met and to what degree they become integrated, as well as the role of schools in this effort, in small rural communities in the Northern and marginal edge of Europe. The project are based on interviews with parents and young people from Syria. One common expression from the parents is that they seek a safe future for their children and they have high ambitions for their children. Still, the combination of past trauma and present uncertainty causes much stress for both the parents and the children. The project has an interdisciplinary approach, combining theories from cultural geography and social learning, in order to analyse how place constitute important contexts for experiences within different fields for different age groups, for boys and girls and for parents. This is a fruitful approach in order to analyse and develop guidelines for the inclusion in schools as well as in other arenas and network in the daily life. Refugees and other migrants are very often engaged in the same activities in life as most other people, even though being a refugee and a migrant is one part of their life, one important part of their situation and daily life.

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