Paper short abstract:

Departing from an interdisciplinary and ethnographic study of asylum seeker reception centers in Norway, this paper explores the arrival infrastructures and accommodation as it shapes and challenges the ability for refugees to experience belonging and wellbeing in their new place for settlement.

Paper long abstract:

Departing from an interdisciplinary and ethnographic study of asylum seeker reception centres in Norway, this paper explores the arrival infrastructures and accommodation as it shapes the everyday interactions between refugees and the wider social fabric. Places and the related infrastructures are both catalysts and embodiments of societal change and includes both micro-local and macro-global transformations that rescale and reshape geographical space and the redrawing of the layout and social composition of places. Arrival infrastructures and residential environments do not only express cultural values, but also shape conditions for group- and individual identities and belonging, as well as active (inter)relations and interplay. This affects possibilities for just and equal influence and participation in political and civil associations, and access to education, work, health and social services, leisure activities and social networks. The paper argues that the structure and quality of asylum seekers’ arrival and accommodation become a mode of governing, and as such represent a “politics of discomfort”. More so, the paper emphasizes the ethic and aesthetic dimensions of infrastructures and built environment’s interplay in communicating social identity, stigma, power relations and citizenship. Belonging and identity are seen as created in the course of social life, rather than as an ‘ethnos’ often designated as a ‘biological fact’ that cannot be disputed. Thus, the paper highlights how arrival structures and residential environments require certain competences to develop a feeling of belonging and wellbeing, which challenge the ability for refugees and asylum seekers to experience such in their new place for settlement.