Being in limbo or learning to belong? – Telling the stories of asylum seekers in a mill town

Abstract

This paper explores how young asylum seekers learn to belong to a local community. It takes its point of departure from a biographical and socially situated learning perspective and uses four analytical aspects of belonging: biographical experiences, engagement, imagination, and alignment. The data on which this paper is based are biographical interviews with five asylum seekers and field notes from a small mill town in Sweden. The findings show three types of learning: learning to be marginalised, learning to be disconnected, and learning to become a co-participant in the local community. Furthermore, the paper discusses how these learning processes are shaped by biographical experiences as well as access to the various communities of practice in and outside the local community, and how the asylum process negatively impacts their learning to belong to the local community and wider Swedish society.