The Care/Security Nexus of the Humanitarian Border: Assisted Return in Norway

While Assisted Return and deportation are frequently viewed as two different return policies, the first represented as humanitarian and the latter as enforcement, this article argues that there is a continuum between these policies and that they form part of humanitarian border enforcement. Drawing on policy document analysis and interviews with NGOs and with irregular migrants, the article provides a two‐level analysis by examining how AR is presented from the Norwegian governmental perspective and how it is experienced from the Afghan migrant perspectives. The article argues that the government bases its AR policy on the need to maintain the credibility and sustainability of the asylum system, as part of fighting crime, while presenting it as a humanitarian solution. For irregular migrants, however, the experienced lack of proper asylum procedures delegitimizes return policies. Overall, the performative aspects of humanitarianism in return policies contribute to depoliticizing return.publishedVersio

Ambivalent recognition: young unaccompanied refugees’ encounters with Norwegian society

Receiving the right to stay in Norway might seem a critical factor for refugees’ well-being and belonging. Yet, this research shows that young unaccompanied refugees experience ambivalent feelings towards Norwegian society after their resettlement. The study is based on a qualitative research design with 14 young unaccompanied refugees residing in Norway. Drawing on recognition theory, we focus on how participants’ psychosocial well-being is constituted through their encounters with social workers and helpers, restrictive asylum policies, and antiimmigration discourses in Norwegian society. Our findings suggest that, while social workers are central to the well-being of these young people, their interaction is sometimes perceived by the young people as emotional misrecognition. Further, while they have the right to residency, their right to family life is not fully recognised, and this poses a threat to their well-being. Antiimmigration discourses contribute further to feelings of ambivalent recognition. Participants strived to manage through active involvement in relationships, everyday coping, sensemaking, critical reflection and social engagement, insisting on their own and other refugees’ worth. We argue that youthfocused social services must explicitly engage with these young people’s broader legal, emotional and social (mis)recognition and with their ways of managing challenges when assisting them in achieving well-being.publishedVersio

The Care/Security Nexus of the Humanitarian Border: Assisted Return in Norway

While Assisted Return and deportation are frequently viewed as two different return policies, the first represented as humanitarian and the latter as enforcement, this article argues that there is a continuum between these policies and that they form part of humanitarian border enforcement. Drawing on policy document analysis and interviews with NGOs and with irregular migrants, the article provides a two‐level analysis by examining how AR is presented from the Norwegian governmental perspective and how it is experienced from the Afghan migrant perspectives. The article argues that the government bases its AR policy on the need to maintain the credibility and sustainability of the asylum system, as part of fighting crime, while presenting it as a humanitarian solution. For irregular migrants, however, the experienced lack of proper asylum procedures delegitimizes return policies. Overall, the performative aspects of humanitarianism in return policies contribute to depoliticizing return

Differentiation of rights in the Norwegian welfare state: Hierarchies of belonging and humanitarian exceptionalism

Controlling mobility and borders has become a central, defining feature of the state today. Using the Norwegian welfare state as a case study, I argue that the differentiation of rights depending on status categories is an important way in which the state deals with irregular migration. It is also an integral element of border construction and how mobility is managed. How is the Norwegian welfare state differentiating the rights to work, health care, and economic welfare benefits and through which argumentations does the state legitimate these differentiations? This article argues that the practice of differentiation contributes to establishing hierarchies of belonging and enforces the nexus of welfare rights–migration management. Further, the exclusion of certain categories of people from accessing basic welfare services and, consequently, creating precarious lives, is legitimized by the discourse of humanitarian exceptionalism, through which migrants gain some support outside the welfare state system. This facilitates policies and regulations that are “tough on migration”, and produces the irregular subject as apolitical, a victim, and unwanted. The differentiation of rights and the discourses that the state uses to legitimate these differentiations are keys in the negotiation of who should be entitled to which rights in the future

Existential Displacement: Health Care and Embodied Un/Belonging of Irregular Migrants in Norway

Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in Oslo and Bergen, Norway, this article discusses irregular migrants’ experiences of existential displacement and the tactics they use to try to re-establish a sense of emplacement and belonging. More specifically, it argues that irregular migrants’ experiences of embodied unbelonging are a consequence of a violent form of governmentality that includes specific laws, healthcare structures, and migration management rationalities. The article makes this argument by tracing how these experiences translate into embodied effects that feature prominently in migrants’ narratives of suffering while living in a country that purports to provide welfare services to all. The narratives of their state of being-in-the-world are ways through which migrants both experience and express the violence and deprivation they face. I argue that these narratives are instances of structures of feeling (Williams 1973), which are shaped by modes of governmentality. The article shows that irregular migrants’ coping strategies centrally involve faith, religious communities and friends. Irregular migrants draw on these relationships to get by, access healthcare, and to resist the (health) effects of social deprivation and political violence. These relationships allow irregular migrants to find meaningful ways of being-in-the-world and rebuilding, to some extent, a sense of entitlement and belonging

Great expectations: Migrant parents and parent-school cooperation in Norway

One long-standing characteristic of schools in Norway is inclusive education as a primary goal. The last years, the Norwegian government has emphasised increased parent-school cooperation as a way to limit risks, i.e. of drop-outs. This article focuses on how parent-school relationship is played out in an economic and socially diversified urban borough in Bergen, Norway. It draws on fieldwork and interviews among parents, teachers and principals in three different schools. As this article shows, the increased focus on parents’ active engagement in the school encourages and creates expectations of an intensive parenting model. Yet, not all parents are ready, willing or have the capacity to pursue the intensive parenting model. We suggest that the current promotion of middle-class intensive parenting by schools, in practice, shifts the responsibilisation of equal education away from the state towards individual families and undermine the ideals of inclusive education and equal opportunities in Norway.acceptedVersio

Great expectations: Migrant parents and parent-school cooperation in Norway

One long-standing characteristic of schools in Norway is inclusive education as a primary goal. The last years, the Norwegian government has emphasised increased parent-school cooperation as a way to limit risks, i.e. of drop-outs. This article focuses on how parent-school relationship is played out in an economic and socially diversified urban borough in Bergen, Norway. It draws on fieldwork and interviews among parents, teachers and principals in three different schools. As this article shows, the increased focus on parents’ active engagement in the school encourages and creates expectations of an intensive parenting model. Yet, not all parents are ready, willing or have the capacity to pursue the intensive parenting model. We suggest that the current promotion of middle-class intensive parenting by schools, in practice, shifts the responsibilisation of equal education away from the state towards individual families and undermine the ideals of inclusive education and equal opportunities in Norway

The temporality of humanitarianism: Provincializing everyday volunteer practices at European borders

While recognizing that ‘volunteering for refugees’ is entangled in ethical and political power dimensions, this article will discuss how we can ethnographically explore the everyday humanitarian practices of volunteers as shaped in intrinsic ways by their mode of being in the world as ethically concerned human beings. Building on recent scholarship within the anthropology of humanitarianism in which local and everyday versions of humanitarian practice are foregrounded, we wish to further the understanding of everyday volunteer practices through establishing a lens of temporality. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews among small-scale volunteer networks and NGOs in Greece and in Northern Europe working in response to the refugee influx to Europe since 2015, we suggest three different modalities of volunteering among non-professionals, which we designate: temporality of crisis, which concentrates on the impulse to help as an immediate response to a critical moment in time, temporality of care expressing the asymmetrical presences in the field of volunteering and temporality of reflexivity, which highlights ambivalence and doubt as intrinsic to the volunteer practices. In this article, we aim for a provincializing of everyday humanitarian practices and explore humanitarianism ‘from the ground’ and in specific locations and times

Is it mandatory to celebrate birthdays?’ Birthday parties as a test of belonging in Norway

”Is it mandatory to celebrate children’s birthdays?” A mother of five with a Somali background asked this question in a parenting class she attended with other parents from East Africa. The mother explained that she experienced a very specific demands from both the kindergarten and school concerning birthdays: that her children should have a celebration. “Why are children with a migration background not attending birthday parties in our children’s classes at school?” A white middle-class mother asked this rhetorically, partly to herself and partly to others, while discussing how to make a more inclusive school environment in a parents’ meeting at a school. During our fieldwork with parents of different class and ethnic background in a diversified area in Bergen, the second largest city in Norway, we noticed that questions about birthday parties were of high concern among both professionals working with children and many differently situated parents. Some parents in our study discussed how to perform it, others whether to do so at all, and many reflected upon expectations concerning guests, gifts and hosts

Great expectations: Migrant parents and parent-school cooperation in Norway

One long-standing characteristic of schools in Norway is inclusive education as a primary goal. The last years, the Norwegian government has emphasised increased parent-school cooperation as a way to limit risks, i.e. of drop-outs. This article focuses on how parent-school relationship is played out in an economic and socially diversified urban borough in Bergen, Norway. It draws on fieldwork and interviews among parents, teachers and principals in three different schools. As this article shows, the increased focus on parents’ active engagement in the school encourages and creates expectations of an intensive parenting model. Yet, not all parents are ready, willing or have the capacity to pursue the intensive parenting model. We suggest that the current promotion of middle-class intensive parenting by schools, in practice, shifts the responsibilisation of equal education away from the state towards individual families and undermine the ideals of inclusive education and equal opportunities in Norway