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Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the ways, in which Iranian refugees in Germany articulate their lives, experiences, and movements in relation to "integration" and tackles precisely the ways integration also opens up spaces for struggles and resistance against the expectations, stigmatizations and rules.

Paper long abstract:

"Integration" has been used as a combination for "migration" for almost two decades in Germany. Entangling with macro-level political and economic aspects produced around the concept, this combination caused a massive circulation of funding projects and forms of knowledge production about and around the so-called "integration" of immigrants in the German society, which is assumed as a coherent homogeneous unity. On the other hand, This has also severe impacts on the immigrant´s lives through their everyday confrontations with the word. In this paper, I recall three scenes from the field to evaluate the impacts of "Integration" as a discourse and sociopolitical formation on the lives of the Iranian refugees in Germany from their very first confrontations with the word to their attempts of building their lives in a new country. Carried out between 2017-2019, I conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Iranian refugees in Germany in order to investigate the ways in which they articulate their lives, experiences, and movements concerning their confrontation with "integration". Moving beyond the expectations and rules this discourse produced, and also labels such as "integrated" and "not integrated", this paper tackles precisely the ways integration also opens up spaces for struggle and resistance against the expectations, stigmatizations and rules.