Asylum seekers’ experiences of participatory barriers in the educative pre-integrational programmes

Abstract

How a society supports its most vulnerable individuals can serve as a barometer of social inclusion. By engaging in previous debates on how the influx and resettlement of refugees and asylum seekers challenge European educational spaces, this study investigates asylum seekers’ non-engagement and non-participation in one engaged learning project in Finland (the KOTO project – Kotoutuminen taidolla ja taiteella [Integration through Arts and Skills]). A mixed methods approach with convergent design was adopted for the study, which combines qualitative data on asylum seekers’ attributions of their participatory barriers with quantitative data on the relationship between asylum seekers’ demographics and the quantified data on their participatory barriers. The study illuminates how asylum seekers’ liminality, along with the project-based barriers, generates non-engagement and non-participation in the educative pre-integrational programmes in a reception centre context.

Double transition of young migrants in Luxembourg: vulnerable, resilient and empowering integration trajectories in the period of youth

“…In the case of refugees, while waiting for the unfolding of the asylum process, they were left in a sort of a limbo (as found in previous literature, e.g., Hartonen et al, 2022Hartonen et al, , 2023, with their rights severely limited (e.g., the right to cross borders, limited access to the labour market). Such experience, when combined with the protracted stays in reception centres, may have lasting effects even after receiving refugee status (as all the participants interviewed in group 2), affecting their capacity to envision their future and thus stalling or protracting their transition to adulthood.…”

“…Observed structural barriers to the integration process emerged from the analysis are manifold and multidimensional: legal or bureaucratic hurdles, difficulties in finding adequate housing arrangements, challenging school and work integration, the high cost of living in the country, perceived discrimination (e.g., based on language, country of origin, race), absence of family support, lack of adequate language skills in a country that poses the challenges of multilingualism, social isolation. For refugees, there are the added defies of long stays in refugee reception centres (Hartonen et al, 2022(Hartonen et al, , 2023.…”