Reconstructing Policy Narratives
Marta Padovan-Özdemir (Roskilde University, Denmark), Annabelle Wilkins (Kingston University, UK) & Eleonora Narvselius (Lund University, Sweden)
Figure in the UK National Transfer Scheme Protocol for Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children, Home Office/Department for Education (2018)
Narratives draw boundaries, fashion collective identities, and offer common-sensical frameworks for understanding and regulating the targets of policies. Hence, the aim of this aesthetic experiment was to develop a narrative mode of studying policymaking vis-á-vis migrant homemaking.
Based on extensive online document ethnographies in Denmark, Sweden, and the UK, a methodological protocol of narrative re-construction of policies targeting migrants’ homes and homemaking was applied.
More than forty policies identified across the three countries between 2010-2019 have been narratively reconstructed. The analysis of these reconstructed policy narratives shows how the notions of home and homemaking are generally associated with care, protection and humanistic values, and, thus, tightly anchored to the idea of the homeland. However, when faced with migration, home becomes a political site of boundary drawing enhanced by utilitarianism, hostile politics, and exclusion.
Nevertheless, applying a narrative mode of policy analysis triggers the sociological imagination and affords alternative storytelling. Ultimately, this aesthetic experiment has resulted in showcasing how narratives can be both the object of research, a mode of inquiry, a form of display, and, not least, an aesthetic intervention for thinking through and beyond what appears to be common sense in the governing of migrant homemaking.
The results are presented in the following publications:
Narvselius, Eleonora, og Marta Padovan-Özdemir. “Utilitarian and Exclusive Humanism: Conditioned Welcoming through State-Sanctioned Migrant Home-Making”. Ukranian Refugees and the Nordics. Research-Led Best Practice on How to Cater for Ukranian Refugees Arriving in the Nordic Region, redigeret af NordForsk, 48–54. Oslo: NordForsk, 2022. (PUBLICATIONS)
Padovan-Özdemir, Marta, Wilkins, Annabelle & Narvselius, Eleonora, Policing Migrant Homemaking: Narrative Configurations of the Migrant-Home Nexus, Routledge (forthcoming, 2026).
Padovan-Özdemir, Marta & Wilkins, Annebelle, “Social Science Fiction: Re-constructing policy narratives vis-á-vis migrant homemaking” in the edited volume, Aesthetic methodological interventions in migrant homemaking amidst divergent integration politics in Denmark, Sweden and the UK, eds. Fran Lloyd, Eleonora Narvselius & Marta Padovan-Özdemir (forthcoming)