Negotiating fit into host country work settings: Understanding the interplay between the past and the present in the accounts of skilled refugees

Abstract

How do marginalised cultural outsiders negotiate fit into new work settings? I draw on a discursive (re)positioning lens to examine qualitative interview accounts of a group of skilled refugees in Britain and provide insights into three temporal moves they make to portray themselves as unconstrained by a lack of host country cultural know-how, able to swiftly address gaps in knowledge and skills, and able to blend in. I theorise newcomer self-socialisation as a temporal (re)positioning dynamic that involves retrospectively defining oneself as a particular kind of person who has the potential to fit. I argue that temporal (re)positioning enables newcomers to maintain worth, secure external validation and impact on their contexts. I propose that the simultaneous foregrounding and minimising of the past is an important mechanism for skilled refugees to negotiate an ambivalent sense of fit into new work settings.