While mobility and migration is praised as part of successful EU-integration, the migration of human beings that are not EU-citizens are met with restrictive policies and vast reservations (Lemberg-Pedersen 2019). Within the national welfare states, asylum seekers and refugees are increasingly promoted only as assets for the host states, who invests in refugees’ human capital to stimulate growth and employment in industries and occupations in demand of labour power. Welfare workers in Denmark, such as social workers, social educators, nurses and schoolteachers, have since the 1970’s engaged in stimulating the refugee with reference to the welfare state’s social-liberal norms concerning self-sufficiency and the achievement of life quality, aiming to integrate and form the refugee within the existing capitalistic welfare society (Padovan-Özdemir and Øland 2022b, 100–127). Recently, Heba Gowayed, has constructed a theory of state-structured human capital (2022, 4) to study how Syrian refugees’ human capital “is augmented, transformed, or destroyed by national incorporation polices” in the US, Canada and Germany. But while Gowayed focuses on how different national policies either recognises and/or invests in one group of newcomers across three states, I will focus on how municipal integration workers have sought to transform and potentialize refugees in local communities and its different economies.

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. In this paper, I investigate how municipal integration workers engage with refugees in the name of integration and mandated by a range of policies within employment, social work, social education, schooling, youth activities, etc. I consider integration work as educational work with the intent of forming refugees as integrated citizens within the welfare nation state. The purpose of the paper is to gain knowledge about how the persons labelled as refugees are casted between refugeedom and being human in the host society (Gatrell 2016; Mandić 2022; Padovan-Özdemir and Øland 2022a).

The theoretical framework is based on refugee studies as well as anthropological history and post-migrant and post-human perspectives. From refugee studies, I recruit concepts of labelling and categorising practices which have proven fruitful to uncover how modes of ordering the refugee are complex and shifting and related to the institutions (e.g., NGOs, or governments) regulating the realities of the refugees in a space of legal, bureaucratic and social categories (Zetter 2007; Janmyr and Mourad 2018). From anthropological history, I borrow Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of interior frontiers to illuminate how the incorporation processes that the refugee go through takes place within interior frontiers (re)establishing social relations of inequality: subordination and superordination, insiders and outsiders, in evaluative and affective spaces through multiple attributes and sensibilities (Stoler 2022). Finally, I also include post-migrant and post-human perspectives from cultural studies and educational studies to challenge the hierarchical relations between insiders and outsiders to the Western nation state. Post-migrant perspectives seek to transcend the logic of a “migrantology” accounting for refugees and migrants perspectives and emphasise a post-migrantcondition (Römhild 2017), while post-human perspectives also challenges the internal borders of what it means to be human by including epistemic disobedience to the category of the human and humanity (McKittrick 2015; Wynter 2003), and to Western Man and its foundation on “European colonisation, racialisation, and the dehumanisation of native and African peoples” (Zembylas 2022, 336).

The research question underpinning this paper is: How is the refugee potentialized within local communities’ integration practices, and how is the human casted within this affectively charged political rationality?

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 interviews were conducted from December 2021 to June 2022. The municipalities are investigated as organisations (Corvellec 2015; Phillips 1995). The employees are selected from six municipalities that differ in terms of political history, socio-geographical position, and approach to receiving refugees and 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 consists 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 is analysed in two steps. First, descriptive analyses were made by summarising (1) the notions the integration workers used to describe the refugee, and the stories they told (2) about the interventions that were activated to integrate the refugee, (3) the driving actors in the integration processes, and (4) the municipalities’ and the local communities’ development in relation to receiving refugees. These first descriptive analyses were noted, and exemplified with quotes from the original transcripts, in tables with 4 columns and one entry for each document or interview. Second, another analytical reading strategy was constructed, energised by the theoretical framework’s interpretative strength. This reading strategy focussed on investigating how the refugee was potentialized within the interior frontiers of the local communities and their different economies, especially by close readings column 1 and 4 from the first descriptive analyses.

The paper is expected to expose a dynamic field of categories casting the refuge between, on the one hand, being an individual with an (often temporary) right to protection and care from the local community, and, on the other hand, being a potential labourer that must be ‘held active’ to fill whatever gaps there are at the bottom of a stratified post-industrial labour market. In this situation, long-term investments in education beyond language training, and recoveries from health issues, are hard to pursue for the refugee. However, the paper is also expected to exhibit subcategories of refugees, for instance portraying how Ukrainians, as opposed to Syrians or Eritreans, most often are thought of as ‘closer to us’ and therefore triggering administrative procedures that result in extra care and protection, e.g., understanding of their traumas to the extent that it may make them unable to work. Hence, a strong normalising practice focussing on work and bordering practices differentiating between social kinds seems to be in play. The analysis will aim to disaggregate and dismantle this normalising practice and its self-affirming logic, making room for complexity and contradiction. One major task is to dismantle the economising logic, which seems to turn the refugee body into a potential asset for the productivity of the local labour market and for wealth and prosperity for the companies. Another task is to challenge the concept of the human that rests firmly within these logics, and instead point to being human as praxis, which may support new forms of care and welfare beyond Western Man’s shapeshifting refusal “to feel the pain of others in their colonization and enslavement” (Zembylas 2022, 337).

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