Familieliv i komplekse forløb fra krig til eksil

brud, kollektiv håndtering og afmægtiggørende processer

Abstract

This article is based on Ditte Shapiro’s doctoral thesis “Family life in transition – experiences of rupture and re-establishing everyday life in Syrian families” (Shapiro, 2017a) that explores the question of how families experience and are able to conduct a shared everyday life in the proces of formed migration and resettlement in Denmark. Ditte followed five Syrian families in their everyday life, in cooperation with an interpreter, from their arrival and throughout their first 1,5 year in Denmark. The aim of the project was to gain insight into the conditions, which potentially limit or enable families to reproduce and develop a shared everyday life in changing contexts. Based on a ‘psychology from the standpoint of the subject’ and the concept ‘conduct of everyday life’ the analysis represents a situated family perspective on forced migration and the re-establisment of an everyday life in exile. The analysis shows that recurring ruptures and collective agency are central aspects of the families’ trajectories of forced migration and resettlement. The longitudinal perspective on the yearlong trajectories of the families provides insight into complex processes that change the agency of families in relation to changing living conditions, in which access to local communities are vital. Unfolding the compound everyday life of refugee families across local and transnational contexts shows that forced migration and resettlement can be a disempowering process characterized by isolation, suffering and powerlessness. The analysis also shows that it is possible to develop a sense of local belonging while conducting a coherent but still distributed and challenged everyday family life. The insight into complex nexuses that are shaping the experiences of either powerlessness or agency, and local belonging or isolation, points to an understanding of collective agency and suffering as anchored in the social political conditions of refugee families in exile.