Public Defence: Kari Bergset

This dissertation develops knowledge about parents-in-exile’s everyday practices and their meaning-making of those. Refugee parents are a minority who are often exposed to the majority’s opinions on their practices, and, therefore, this study calls for attention to their own meaning-making in context. Parenting is often an issue in refugee parents’ encounters with welfare services. Consequently, knowledge production from this study is relevant to welfare service providers. Based on a sociocultural perspective, the following overriding research question is explored: How are parental practices and the evolvement of parental practices in the host country narrated in refugee parents’ narratives, and which meanings are they given?

The study’s material includes 27 narrative based interviews of 12 fathers and 13 mothers from 16 families, who, at the time of the interview, had been living in Norway for approximately 10 years. They all arrived in Norway as asylum seekers, quota refugees, or as family reunified spouses. The families came from Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq, and were settled by immigration authorities in the north of Western Norway. Life mode interviews focusing on everyday occurrences were conducted. The interviews also explored events from the time of their arrival in Norway up until the day of the interview. 

The dissertation assumes a sociocultural perspective on parenting, and the results of the analyses are presented in three articles that reflect an evolvement in theoretical perspective during the process of the study. Article I is based on analyses inspired by positioning theory, developed by Davies & Harre (1991). The analyses presented in articles II and III are based on a sociocultural approach to meaning making, and are inspired by Bakhtin’s dialogicality.
Article I focuses on children who missed out on education during wars, flight and temporary exiles, and how the parents position their own contributions to their children’s schooling when they need to catch up after resettlement. The analyses show that the parents position themselves as initiators and drivers of collaboration with the school. This differs from a majority of earlier researches on refugee parents’ involvement in their children’s schooling, where the parents are often seen as passive and difficult to get hold of. This contrast is understood to be a result of methodological choices in former studies that might have made parts of the parents’ contribution invisible.

In the course of the process, conceptual aspects of the study have become more central. The context of parenting in exile is understood as cultural complex contact zones where both divertive local and transnational impulses are used as inspiration for parental practices. The cultural complex contact zones are mirrored in the parents’ speech, which, in articles II and III, are analysed as multivoiced. Threads from the past and present, from the divertive diaspora and the home country, and from local and digital contact arenas weave into the parents’ speech. In line with Bakhtin’s (1981) understanding of multivoicedness, the analyses made visible both contradicting and supporting voices in each single parent’s speech. In article II, the dialogues with one particular couple exemplify these analyses. A diversity of mother voices and father voices is made visible in their speech.

Article III looks at change and evolvement in parental practices narrated in the interviews. Acculturation is a common concept of change after migration, understood as adapting to the new country. Analyses of the narratives of change in this study hold, instead, a character of adapting to global cultural complex contact zones. Inspiration for change and evolvement of practices are derived from both local and transnational sources. Dichotomic understanding of contradictions between child raising values in the West and “the rest” are transcended in the analyses. Based on this, change and evolvement are analysed as ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) rather than as acculturation. Alien practices and understandings are tested out, selectively assimilated and intertwined with familiar understandings in a never ending process, which produces evolvement seen as innovation of parental practices. As a part of this process, observations of other parents’ and professionals’ practices with children are central sources for inspiration to change. The fact that all the informants live in small local societies with access to contact with majority families, is seen as a strengthening factor of this phenomenon.

The dissertation provides both empirical and conceptual knowledge to social work and social policy. The Bakhtinian concepts employed are seldom used in social work and migration research; thus, they can serve as conceptual contributions to both fields and in exploring other phenomena.