Refugees’ stories and stories about refugees: Crafting new narratives of the Danish welfare state

The purpose of RESTORE is to craft new narratives of the Danish welfare state at the intersection of refugees’ own life stories on the one hand, and municipalities’ political-administrative stories about receiving refugees on the other hand.

Trompe l'oeil. Bagsiden af et indrammet maleri, 1668 – 1672. Gijsbrechts, Cornelius Norbertus.Open SMK art

Trompe l'oeil. Bagsiden af et indrammet maleri, 1668 – 1672. Gijsbrechts, Cornelius Norbertus.

RESTORE uses narrative interviewing with refugees and municipal civil servants in branches of education, employment and integration. The project gathers document material and engages in crossing narrative analyses that will create new knowledge about the politics of storytelling and Nordic welfare state exceptionalism in a global post-migrant, postcolonial and transnational condition.

By combining insights from refugee and migration studies, integration and welfare state studies, race and racialization studies, affective studies, and memory and narrative studies, RESTORE will illuminate silenced and evaded voices and authorships while rewriting and extending the master narrative of the Danish welfare state.

Read the project description.

 

 

 

Brøndum, T. (2023). The Curse of the Refugee’: Narratives of Slow Violence, Marginalization and Non-Belonging in the Danish Welfare State. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, no. 2 (November), 96–112.

Brøndum, T. (2025). And Now I Feel I Don’t Have a Clear Future’: Hauntings and Temporal Uncertainty in Refugee NarrativesJournal of Refugee Studies, February, feaf011.

Brøndum, T. & Øland, T. (2025). Refugeedom and its bordering practices: Humanity divided and potentialized within Danish integration1. In Forced Migrants in Nordic Histories, edited by Johanna Leinonen, Hans Otto Frøland, Christhard Hoffmann, Seija Jalagin, Heidi Vad Jønsson, Miika Tervonen, and Malin Thor Tureby. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press.

Øland, T. (2024). Maybe We Should Start Paying the Hours Properly’: State Violence and Ambivalent Moments of Enforced Emancipation of Refugee WomenSocial Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 31 (3): 586–609.

More on the way.

 

Researchers

Navn Titel Telefon E-mail
Øland, Trine Lektor +4535328889 E-mail

Funding

Indenpendent research fund denmark

Project period: 1 January 2021 - 31 December 2025

PI: Trine Øland