A disruptive contrast: the working body in educational institutions

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 28. Beyond Employment

Abstract

In this paper, I emphasize the transitional nature of refugees’ encounters with adult education in Sweden. As products of their history, refugees have diverse experiences based on what they have carried with them in the migration process, such as traditions, ways of living, feelings, actions, and ways of thinking, as well as social and mental structures internalized from the society they have left behind (Sayad, 2004).
I focus on Kurdish agricultural workers from Syria by exploring the extent to which their institutionalized and embodied forms of cultural capital determined their experiences with access to and integration into the Swedish labor market. This is achieved through Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, bringing forward how dimensions of habitus play out as an eternal present for this group. I draw on 25 interviews with refugee families from Syria and historical sources to reconstruct the Syrian context. Eight of these interviews were conducted with agricultural workers and form the focus of this paper.
Dividing this group based on educational backgrounds (from illiterate to highly educated) and positions in Syria as landowners or peasants, I discuss how experiences and strategies regarding the Swedish labor market differ, mainly according to pre-migration social status. Adult education in Sweden conveyed a conflicting message: while integration was framed as inclusion and social cohesion, experiences with these programs suggested (dis)integration from their ways of living and from previous social structures.
I show how adult education becomes a place of being stuck, of preserving pre-migration social status, or of accumulating further educational assets, depending on how this group negotiated between past and present circumstances and between educational opportunities and systemic constraints. The paper contributes to the ASA theme by demonstrating how sociology can inform more equitable integration policies that recognize differentiated forms of capital rather than treating refugees as uniformly deficient.

Author

• Nubin Ciziri