Description
Family life of refugees is shaped by migration policies, as only a very small number of young people are successfully reunited with parents and siblings after migration. The majority maintain and negotiate ties with family and kin at a distance, even though social media platforms may bridge the ‘there’ and the ‘here’ (Marlowe & Bruns, 2020). At the same time, they build new relationships with peers, colleagues, professionals and communities in their new countries. Knowledge about how young refugees maintain old family ties and (re)establish new family-like relationships over time, and how these processes are linked to each other, is however scarce.In this paper, we explore how young people create relational wellbeing through relying on (often complex) family relationships and establishing new family-like relationships. Furthermore, we are interested in how young people understand the role and meaning of persons defined as family within the wider transnational and local network contexts. Our theoretical point of departure is an interest in the relationality of wellbeing, rather than looking at wellbeing as an individual outcome, and how societal structures impact on relational processes (White, 2015).
The data comprises individual interviews with 51 young people in Finland, Norway and Scotland about their social networks, with a particular focus on persons that young people define as ‘family’. In addition, we draw on paired interviews where some young people chose to be interviewed alongside someone who felt ‘family-like’, even though they were not a family member per se, about how their relationship had developed over time.
In the analysis we explore how young people describe ‘relational exchanges’ and how these are linked to processes of relational wellbeing in the present; for example, how different roles and types of relationships shape expectations and ways of staying in contact and supporting each other (and the opposite) as well as negotiated over time and linked to connectedness. Furthermore, we are interested in what young people’s narratives can teach us about the social structures within which important reciprocal and trusted relationships are negotiated, for example discourses of inclusion and exclusion, systems for redistribution of resources and power dynamics. The data were collected as part of the Drawing Together project, funded by NordForsk (2020-2024).
| Period | 2 Dec 2021 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | FinlandShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |