The presentation will be based on a current research project about refugees’ memories and experiences from the time before and after their flight. Through narrative interviews with individuals who have fled from their homeland to Denmark, the presentation will address how people are being cast as refugees and how they narratively make meaning of and integrate such experiences to their overall life story. An initial thesis of the project has been that such processes of ‘casting’ and of becoming a refugee entails complex processes of marginalization in which the individuals’ meetings with welfare and immigration services produce norms that the refugees have to oblige and accommodate to.

Hence, the research question of the project that will be addressed in this presentation is,

How do differing groups of refugees make meaning of their life before and after their flight and how are Danish welfare system encounters integrated into these narratives?

In the presentation, I will illustrate empirical examples that relates to this question. In this, I will have a special focus on

a) homeland memories, that reflect on life before their flight, and

b) narrative accounts of central institutional settings in their new host country related to meetings and experiences with Danish welfare institutions and welfare workers, related to for instance reception centers, language schools, education, and the like.

By employing this focus, the presentation will discuss how the refugees integrate these experiences into their life story and make meaning of their new life, new relations and new obligations in Denmark.

The project is situated in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 and is as such situated in a political and social context in which the political landscape in Denmark has realized considerable policy restrictions and changes in legislation directed at refugees. Amongst other consequences this entails uncertainty, long waiting time, and for many, only a temporary right to protection. From another perspective, the context mirrors political debates on the role of the nation state and its welfare provisions aimed at newcomers to the state. A range of studies has critically examined this relation and problematized the ways in which welfare services and provisions are distributed and how symbolic borders are drawn (Øland 2019, Padovan-Özdemir, M., & T. Øland 2018, Whyte 2015).

According to Römhild (2021), this calls for an alternative so-called ‘postmigrant thinking’, that take on new perspectives in our ways of dealing with forced migration in Europe. This demands a shift in focus in which we take into account the societal dynamics that create certain understandings of "the refugee" as the "Other". Furthermore, this shows a need for a broader historical perspective that takes into account transnational and postcolonial understandings of power structures within the categories employed (Römhild 2021, Øland 2019).    

The project employs narrative interviews with a range of refugees (or former refugees) that have fled to Denmark within the last 30 years. In total the project will be based on approximately 25-30 interviews with individuals coming from Syria, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Somalia. The interviews are structured by explorative questions making room for the refugees’ own memories, reflections, and storytelling. When studying refugees’ experiences within educational research, a narrative approach can help us understand how people make sense of their positions in society and in relation to larger societal change and disrupture (Eastmond, 2007). People understand the world through narratives and when we connect individual experiences to the outside world it is the narratives employed, that provide meaning and purpose (Horsdal 2012). In this way, narratives can be understood both as concrete accounts of a situation, as well as individual or collective reflections of this very same event (Jackson, 2013). Studying the narrative accounts of refugee experiences can give access to processes of lived experience and to subjective experiences of social life. Furthermore, by employing narrative interviews and analysis when studying refugees, we can give voice to difficult life experiences and ways of adopting to new life conditions and professional interventions for a marginalized group in society. Finally, narrative interviews can give access to peoples own meaning making, voices and not least own narrative constructions of cohesion – also in life situations, that do not in itself seem to encompass such cohesion (Delgado 1989, Ricoeur 2004). These aspects make narrative interviews a highly relevant way of gaining insight in, how refugees make sense of their new life conditions and reestablish a sense of self and existence in order to understand how people experience and navigate in shifting relations, expectations and welfare conditions in their new setting.

The expected outcome of the paper is to identify common stories, structures and performances of the collective refugee and post-refugee condition (Eastmond 2007, Römhild 2021). In doing so, I will show differences and similarities in the experience of coming to a new country as a refugee. Ranging over a 30-year period regarding these experiences, I hope to illustrate how this experience of being cast as a refugee has changed over time and are at least in part related to the shifting political discourses and management of the area. Furthermore, the presentation will address how memory work is activated in the narratives either as narrative constructions of meaning and purpose - or as the opposite, as silence, uncertainty and lack of closure (Brøndum 2016, Jackson 2013, Ricoeur 2004). The overall project is a part of a collaborative project in which also the narratives of a range of municipal employees will be analysed (RESTORE: https://komm.ku.dk/forskning/paedagogik/velfaerd/restore/). Based on the empirical analyses and theoretical work, the collective project will abstract new understandings of the connections between types of subject-based experiences from a marginalised group in society, and types of institutional welfare state-based narratives. It will moreover abstract how they intersect and create multiple meanings in terms of new narratives of the Danish welfare state in a global postmigrant, postcolonial and transnational condition. Together, it is the aim of the project to show new nuances in the master narrative of the Danish welfare state.

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