From Young Migrants to ‘Good Swedes’
Belonging and the Manifestations of Borders and Boundaries in NGO Social Work
av
Maria Moberg Stephenson
Akademisk avhandling
Avhandling för filosofie doktorsexamen i socialt arbete, som kommer att försvaras offentligt
fredag den 9 april 2021 kl. 10.15, Hörsal L2, Örebro universitet Opponent: Professor Bridget Anderson
Bristol University Bristol, Storbritannien
Örebro universitet
Institutionen för juridik, psykologi och socialt arbete 701 82 ÖREBRO
Abstract
Maria Moberg Stephenson (2021): From Young Migrants to ‘Good Swedes’. Belonging and the Manifestations of Borders and Boundaries in NGO Social Work. Örebro Studies in Social Work 24.
Belonging is a contested concept, and for young people arriving unac-companied by parents to seek asylum in Sweden, belonging is condition-al. The aim of this thesis is thus to analyse belonging in the context of an NGO mentoring programme for young people defined as unaccompa-nied in Sweden. By intersecting different dimensions of belonging, this is studied both from the young people’s own perspective and within the work of the mentoring programme. The thesis builds on interviews, participant observations, and policy documents gathered from the NGO mentoring programme, which more specifically works with ‘unaccom-panied’ young people placed in kinship care in a Swedish suburban neighbourhood to support their establishment in Sweden. Participating in the study are young people involved in the programme and the em-ployed mentors. The results show that the young people create a sense of belonging through transnational and local migrant networks, while the NGO perceives the young people’s situations in kinship care and in the Swedish suburban neighbourhood as limited. The mentoring pro-gramme’s work to promote establishment is intended to help the young people to overcome possible boundaries, and to reach a belonging to Swedish society. As such, the work can be interpreted as a form of boundary work. However, this work risks producing new boundaries – those between a desired, but imagined, ‘Swedish community of value’, and the migrant ‘other’. Hierarchies of belonging are thus created, with-in which the young people must strive to become ‘good Swedes’ to be seen as established in society. The thesis also shows how these bounda-ries can be challenged within social work by acting against racial struc-tures and imagined collective communities. It thus argues for the im-portance of acknowledging and actively working with young people’s transnational and local networks to avoid the reproduction of bounda-ries.
Keywords: Unaccompanied Young People, NGO Social Work, Belonging,
Borders, Boundaries, Community, Citizenship, Mentoring, Kinship Care Maria Moberg Stephenson, School of Law, Psychology, and Social Work Örebro University, SE-701 82 Örebro, Sweden,
