Paper short abstract:

Since the 1990s the concept of ‘integration’, has been used (and abused) in Denmark to discuss aspect of immigrant's everyday life. However, the concept not only promotes a specific social imaginary of Danish society, but it also mobilizes reified (and problematic) notions of culture, race and belonging

Paper long abstract:

One of the major challenges doing and writing ethnography 'at home', where you to a large extent share the language, values and conceptual framework of you informants, is to create a distance between emic and ethic concepts and between the public and/or political discourses and the academic analysis. The challenge may be even more severe when working in the politicized field of immigration.

This paper discuss some of the problems related to the concept of 'integration', that since it was introduced in the 1990s has been used (and abused) in Denmark to discuss socio-economic, cultural and religious challenges related to everyday life of ethnic minorities. The concept of 'integration' is not (and never was) innocent but simultaneously promotes a specific social imaginary of Danish society and a 'problematization' of immigrants and their relationship to the indigenous majority, based on reified notions of culture, race and belonging.

Therefore, inspired by Lila Abu-Lughod's seminal article 'writing against culture' (1990), the paper ends up suggesting some strategies of how to 'write against integration'. The aim is to reinstall a distance between emic and etic discourses, so that academic analysis can regain its critical potential.