Everyday navigation between adaptation and resistance: How young people negotiate their well-being in relation to assigned migrant positions in school

Abstract

Concerning the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015 and how it affected the position of young migrants in society, researchers have underscored the value of studies challenging one-sided images of migrant youth. This study examines how migrant positions are constituted, negotiated, and related to young people’s well-being. The study was undertaken using an ethnographic approach combined with the theoretical concept of translocational positionality to acknowledge how positions are created through historical and political processes and, at the same time, are context-dependent over time and space and thus contain incongruities. Our findings show how the newly arrived youth used multiple ways to navigate the school’s everyday life and ascribed migrant positions to achieve well-being as illustrated through the distancing, adapting, defense, and the contradictory positions. Based on our findings, we understand the negotiations that occur in forming migrant positions within the school as asymmetric. At the same time, the youths’ diverse and often contradictory positionality showed in various ways the striving for increased agency and well-being.

Social, Spatial and Material Conditions for Mattering: Newly Arrived Young Migrants’ Possibilities to Matter in Everyday Life in a Swedish School

“…The young people arrive at alreadygiven arrangements within the Swedish school (cf. Lögdberg et al, 2023;Hagström, 2018). Thus, the school's spatial organization and material orientation around and towards Swedishness, as a specific form of whiteness and, thus, as a particular form of power position in a society oriented around Swedishness (Mattsson, 2005), conditions how the young people can matter to others.…”

“…The material for this article consists of field notes from observations and interview data collected from ethnographic fieldwork (for more details, see Lögdberg et al, 2023). The study was conducted with the approval of the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Dnr 2021-01389).…”

“…The school arrangements were aimed at and based on learning about each other's cultures, with a starting point in differences (cf. Lögdberg et al, 2023). For example, the girls were asked to visit the mainstream classes to talk about veil-wearing from their perspective.…”

“…The teachers discussed these values as Swedish values and contrasted them with countries 'that did not stand for these', such as, according to the teachers, the countries from which the newly arrived youths came (cf. Lögdberg et al, 2023). As a path to integration, the orientation around and towards Swedishness (cf.…”

“…By parallel school life, we refer to the research in a Swedish context that illustrates how schooling for newly arrived youths is characterized by separation in different ways: temporal, spatial, and above all, social. Studies show how this division creates perceived boundaries and distinctions based on normative Swedishness and, at the same time, exclusive power positions in a society oriented around Swedishness (Hagström, 2018;Mattsson, 2005;Lögdberg et al, 2023). Hagström (2018) calls LI a 'racialized sidetrack' within the Swedish upper secondary school.…”