Paper short abstract:

The paper explores dwelling through learning of immaterial knowledge and skills as well as social and cultural practices that migrants need to make a place a home. Learning is studied through analyzing encounters between migrants and employment officials in an employment office in Finland.

Paper long abstract:

Migrants face a situation where they have left their former homes and are entering into a new society and culture, where they hope to find places of dwelling and experience them as home. This paper explores dwelling through learning of immaterial knowledge and skills as well as social and cultural practices that migrants need to experience and to make a space and place a home. This knowledge also enables migrants to gain the full agency in the new society.

In this paper, dwelling is studied through encounters between migrants and employment officials in Finland and through migrant´s learning processes in institutional context. In this context, learning means both learning the new language and the so called tacit knowledge about the new society, e.g. institutional and social practices.

What may migrants learn in official encounters? This question is explored through analyzing discussions between immigrant clients and employment officials in an employment office in Finland. Video recorded discussions and interviews with employment officials show that the employment official´s contextualizing narrative in interaction reveals the information that the migrant needs in order to learn the practices of the new community. The official´s narrative also reveals a critical point in the process of integration: if this information is silenced, the migrant´s dwelling and making of home is seriously hampered. To avoid the migrant´s experience of exclusion, it´s important to explain so called "self-evident" cultural knowledge and practices explicitly to the newcomers.