Political history in Denmark has since the end of the 1970s increasingly constructed immigrants and refugees as strangers to the welfare nation state (Moldenhawer and Øland 2013). Immigrants and refugees were racialized as deficient groups who did not adjust themselves and thus threatened the welfare state, which called for interventions and moralisations to strengthen society and re-craft the welfare state. This move also occurred in other European states and has been termed new realism, which is characterised by politically having the guts to ‘speak frankly’ about and finding ‘creative solutions’ to the problem of integration (Prins 2002, 368). In Denmark, a particular economic and pathological concern about society’s as well as the individual refugee’s degeneration since the 1970s has been identified as the backcloth for racialized welfare dynamics directed at refugees (Padovan-Özdemir and Øland 2018). And when refugees arrived at the Danish border in 2014 and 2015, the political response was firm promotion of restrictive Danish immigration and asylum policies, support to the Frontex policing of EU borders and pursuits for providing humanitarian aid in faraway refugee camps, e.g. in Northern Africa.
This is the political atmosphere in which educational and welfare work with refugees takes place. Integration work is predominantly about helping the refugees to become self-supporting, useful to society and independent of the municipality, and different policies, strategies and action plans are launched to make that happen, e.g. language training, trainee service, volunteering, trauma treatment, etc.
In this paper, I will investigate how municipal employees work with refugees in the name of integration and how this work is mandated by a range of policies within employment, social work, social education, schooling, youth activities, etc. In this paper, I consider integration work as educational work with the intent of forming refugees as integrated, employed and useful within the welfare nation state.
The paper has two purposes. First, it seeks to create knowledge about how municipalities and municipal employees make sense of receiving and integrating refugees as they organise integration. Second, the paper seeks to develop a theoretical framework, which is able to conceptualise this sense making in a context of multiple and complex policymaking.
The theoretical framework is based narrative analysis as well as policy anthropology. From narrative analysis, I especially employ the notion emplotment which is about creating a whole out of a succession of events; it is about how a story is told by plotting events so they are part of a larger temporal whole (Ricoeur 1984). From Critical Race Theory’s toolbox (Delgado 1989), I also use the notion of majoritarian stories, standard stories or stock stories (Padovan-Özdemir and Øland 2020), which are “description[s] of events as told by members of dominant/majority groups, accompanied by the values and beliefs that justify the actions taken by dominants to insure their dominant position” (Love 2004, 228–29). From policy anthropologist Tess Lea, I borrow the concept policy ecology which is made to think of and approach policy as an environment and as a wild force (Lea 2020, 11–12). It mimes well with Stephen Ball’s (2006) complex view on policy analysis, encompassing policy as things, processes and outcomes, and it makes it possible to analyse efforts directed at a target group such as refugees across policy areas. Finally, it makes it possible to describe “policy’s natural incoherence, its steady-state irrationality” (Ibid.,12), countering policy as rational thought having ‘unintended consequences’ in practice, and promoting the idea of policies as having “multiple genealogies and chronologies” (Ibid.).
The research question that underpins this paper is: How do municipal integration workers make sense of refugees’ integration processes within a wild policy environment?

The paper is based on narrative interviews with 30 municipal employees who receive and integrate refugees, and their reunited families, within the spheres of employment, social work, social education, schooling, youth activities, etc. The municipalities are investigated as organisations (Corvellec 2015). The employees are selected from five municipalities that differ in terms of political history, approach to receiving refugees and ways of organising integration processes. In the interviews, the employees are asked to tell about how they began working with integration, what their integration tasks are, how they assess the municipality’s development in relation to refugees, how they think it affects the social life of the municipality to have refugees, how the municipality makes sense of integrating refugees, how and why the approach to refugees may have shifted, how and why there may have been different points of view approaching refugees, and how refugees are thought of and how the challenge of refugees is conceived of. Furthermore, the paper is based on documentary material collected in each municipality. The material consist of municipal integration policies and other relevant policies, counting documents regulating the municipal refugee economy, strategies and action plans, including also those that traverses the area of integrating refugees from general policy areas. The material will be analysed in two steps. First, storytelling qualities in interviews and documents will be registered with a focus on subjectivations (ascribed roles and their qualities), objectivations (problem descriptions and their knowledge base), events (interventions and activities) and meaning making (justifications and legitimisations) (Padovan-Özdemir and Øland 2022). Second, stories will be composed and decomposed on the basis of assembling thematic clusters of storytelling qualities, following how emplotment, interruption and subversion takes place.

The paper is expected to expose the struggle involved in the emplotment of emerging narratives about how integrating refugees makes sense. It will hopefully provide insights into how narratives are productive, performative and not least how they are dialogical in the sense that different narratives interact and overlap (cf. Rothberg 2009). In that way, the paper will illustrate how municipalities identify and share collective meaning across the policy environment they share. The analysis will thus open the interpretive machinery of local bureaucratic reasoning. It will describe how stories circulate and intersect, and how narrative structures emerge in the chaotic nature of wild and local bureaucracy. Narrative interruptions, resisting the assigned emplotment, and subversions are excavated as part of the chaos, which may allow us to “imagine, represent and hear the subjective worlds of troubled others and, thus, to raise awareness of social injustices that cause profound suffering and displacement” (Savy and Sawyer 2007, 86). In other words, the analysis will include insights into how local narratives may distort the world they purport to describe and, thus, tap in on creating new narratives of the Danish welfare state in a global space where, e.g., refugees are present. These new narratives will be further constructed in collaboration with a project on refugees’ stories about war and welfare in the project RESTORE: https://komm.ku.dk/forskning/paedagogik/velfaerd/restore/

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