Personal, peaceful, progressive: Integration workers’ narratives of refugee settlement and the rural

Abstract

Settlement of refugees in rural areas in Norway is part of a national strategy to counter depopulation and thus links to ideas of revitalization and more promising futures for these areas. It also links up to an idea of smaller communities as ‘better at integrating’, as smaller communities both enable and necessitate more contact between the original population and newcomers. However, although some municipalities reap advantages of the dispersed settlement policy and succeed in retaining settled refugees, other municipalities ‘fail’. This article explores how the integration of refugees in rural communities is interpreted by public integration workers in two rural–coastal municipalities where the outcomes differ significantly. Drawing on 15 qualitative interviews, we discuss how integration workers make sense of local integration efforts, and how notions of the rural are (re)produced through their integration narratives. The analysis finds that the integration narratives draw on and reproduce both distinct and overlapping imaginaries of rural areas. We identify two main imaginaries: the rural as future‐oriented and dynamic, and the rural as close‐knit and peaceful.