Paper short abstract:

With reference to asylum seekers' experiences, as these are accessed by an approach of "being there", I suggest how asylum seekers transform and embed a variety and mobilities of identity, belonging and wellbeing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on how asylum seekers in Norway struggle with challenges in social experiences and materialities that shape identity, belonging and wellbeing. Places and the related environments and material structures are seen as both catalysts and embodiments of societal change and express not only cultural values, but also form conditions for group- and individual identities and belonging, as well as active (inter)relations and interplay. While discussing such challenges characterised by marginalisation, stigmatisation and enclavement, I stress how the ethnographic approach of engaging in face-to-face relations can highlight knowledge creation as fundamentally generated in a complex web of relations between people distinctly positioned within social and environmental structures, and cultural values and meaning, emotions and imaginations. Recognising such relations, I argue how the subject always holds both a personal and social history, which cannot be fully grasped by symbols or language. With reference to asylum seekers' experiences, as these are accessed by an approach of "being there", I suggest how asylum seekers transform and embed a variety and mobilities of identity, belonging and wellbeing that respond to and reach beyond social marginalization and enclavement. More so, I argue that the migrant experience, further than asylum seekers, speaks of a human disposition of flexibility and imaginations in the becoming of self, belonging and wellbeing.