‘It can be good there too’: home and continuity in refugee children's narratives of settlement

Abstract

Drawing on refugee children's narratives about their experiences of settlement after prolonged stays in asylum centres, this article explores how the process of home-making is experienced in the everyday lives of children (7–12 year olds) settling with their parents in Norway. This article examines the importance of home as a material and relational space where children's expectations of an ideal home and existing standards together influence the process of home-making. Settlement is found to be a turning point in the lives of refugee families; it is a way of making oneself at home, sustaining continuity in children's world of movement, as well as linking space and time in their lives.

Keywords:

• asylum centre
• continuity
• home
• refugee children
• settlement

Acknowledgements

The study was supported by The Research Council of Norway. The author is grateful to the anonymous referees who commented on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the international conference Children and Migration: Identities, Mobilities and Belonging(s), 9–11th April 2008, Department of Geography, University College, Cork, Ireland.

Gay Becker (1997) refers to disrupted lives as the disruptive changes people may go through in the course of their life. In her work she examines the process by which people attempt to create continuity after an unexpected disruption to their life.

There are different types of asylum centres according to the stage that an application has reached. This article deals only with standard asylum centres where asylum-seekers live while waiting for a response to their application from the authorities.

Goffman defines a ‘total institution’ as ‘a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life’ (1961, p. 11).

Some children had turned 13 before the second meeting. Exchanges with younger and older siblings occurred at various times during fieldwork, but they were not interviewed as such.