Paper short abstract:

The paper is based on an ethnographic approach opening for insights in the shaping of social space and compositions of places. It appears that asylum infrastructures promotes instability and insecurity more than stability and settlement, and challenges asylum seekers' homing and wellbeing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the housing and arrival infrastructures as it effects the asylum seekers’ homing and wellbeing in Norway. The study is based on an interdisciplinary and ethnographic approach that open for insights in the shaping of social space and compositions of places. Arrival infrastructures and residential environments do not only express cultural values, but also shape conditions for group- and individual identities and belonging, active (inter)relations and interplay as they stay or move on. From the study, it appears that asylum seekers’ housing, arrival structures and residential environments promote instability and insecurity more than stability and settlement, and challenges asylum seekers homeliness and wellbeing. The paper underlines how housing and infrastructures can be seen as relational and suggests to also include imageries and emotions related to everyday “being with others” and experiences in “lived life”. This is a view inspired by a critical phenomenological understanding in which materiality and images are perceived and experienced within inter-relational relations that constitute senses of home and wellbeing, while also estrangement, discomfort and illness. The paper argues that the structure and quality of asylum seekers’ arrival and accommodation become a mode of governing that moves toward a “politics of uncertainty” requiring new modes of responsibilities and care.