The (un)celebrated asylum centre: How Danish media hijacked an ethnographic fieldwork and altered local realities

Abstract

Denmark’s oldest asylum centre has been in operation in the small town of Jelling since 1993. Here, over time, the institutions of the local community and the asylum centre have merged, spatially and socially. Today, a local daycare centre and the local after-school club operate on the premises of the asylum centre. Based on an ethnographic study of the everyday institutional neighbourliness between ‘asylum centre’ and ‘local community’ in this small Danish town, this tale from the field pertains to the overwhelming national media attention that hit the research case halfway through its term – and unpacks how public media collaboration came to alter the very local state of affairs that I was in the middle of studying. It is argued how, more than simply dissemination partners or collaborators, ‘the media’ instead turned into actual co-creators of the ethnographic field – and so of the concrete empirical findings and analyses.