Social Work, Young Migrants and the Act of Listening
This book is about 20 young unaccompanied refugees who have sought refuge in Europe and how they experience and try to navigate their new situations, including their contacts with social workers, friends and family members left behind.
The book contains stories of powerlessness and frustration from being held under suspicion, from meeting authorities and abstract people of power from the system, or from constantly being categorized in a static category of the unaccompanied child. It contains stories of human meetings characterized by thoughtfulness, reciprocity and listening. This book also explores the experiences of meeting social workers as a young migrant in Sweden. The narratives depict how social workers can often reproduce powerlessness and frustration among the young people, but also how there are those social workers who provide something else through the act of listening. By extension, this is a book about society, about how important it can be to reframe people and to listen to their stories, needs and wills.
Demonstrating the importance of listening to the stories of young refuges, this title will appeal to students, researchers, community workers and social workers interested in migration, race and ethnicity, youth studies, social work, sociology, anthropology, pedagogy and health.
Marcus Herz is Associate Professor in Social Work at Malm University, Sweden. His research interests and previous publications include studies on social work, gender, masculinities, ethnicity, race and youth studies. His latest publication is the co-authored book The Conundrum of Masculinity: Hegemony, Homosociality, Homophobia and Heteronormativity (Routledge, 2019).
Philip Lalander is Professor in Social Work at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has extensive experience in ethnographic studies, and his main research interests and publications include studies on marginalization, drug use, criminality, migration and youth studies. His book Hooked on Heroin: Drugs and Drifters in a Globalized World (Routledge, 2020) was the first book in an ethnographic trilogy about heroin users in a Swedish city, covering 15 years. In recent years he has published within the migration area in relation to social work.
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First published 2021
by Routledge
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2021 Marcus Herz and Philip Lalander
The right of Marcus Herz and Philip Lalander to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Herz, Marcus, 1978- author. | Lalander, Philip, 1965- author.
Title: Social work, young migrants and the act of listening: becoming an unaccompanied child / Marcus Herz and Philip Lalander.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge advances in social work | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020040031 (print) | LCCN 2020040032 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367543419 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003088837 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Social work with immigrants--Europe. | Social work with children--Europe. | Unaccompanied immigrant children--Europe. | Unaccompanied refugee children--Europe. | Europe--Emigration and immigration--Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HV4013.E85 H47 2021 (print) | LCC HV4013.E85 (ebook) | DDC 362.7/791253094--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040031
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040032
ISBN: 978-0-367-54341-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-08883-7 (ebk)
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by SPi Global, India
This book would not have been possible without the young people sharing their thoughts, stories and experiences with us with such generosity. Regardless of their everyday challenges, it was important for them to be able to spread their experiences to others: as Farid said to us, I am not doing this for you, you are doing this for us. It was as if they all knew the importance of our research, and for that we are forever grateful. We hope they feel we have been able to do it for themselves and for other people in similar positions, not for us.
This project was financed by The Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (FORTE) under grant no. 2013-0155. This book is based on a Swedish book, Rrelser, grnser och liv, published on Studentlitteratur. We would like to thank Studentlitteratur, and especially our publisher, Johan Lindgren, for all the support and for making it possible for us to rework and release this book to an international audience. An earlier version of Chapter 4 was published previously in the Journal of Youth Studies (Herz and Lalander 2017), and parts of it appeared in Unga infr arbetslivet - Om utanfrskap, lrande och delaktighet (Olofsson and Wikstrm [eds.] 2018). Chapter 6 has also appeared in Young (Lalander and Herz 2020), Chapter 7 in Identities (Herz 2019) and in the Nordic Journal of Migration Research (Lalander and Herz 2018), and Chapter 9 is partly based on an article written by Philip Lalander and Dawan Raoof (2016) published in Socialvetenskaplig Tidskrift. All of this material has been updated and revised for this book.
We also would like to thank our colleagues and friends. During the research project from which this material is collected, Paula Aracena and Dawan Raoof both worked as research assistants, conducting interviews and observations with the young people in this book. Enrique Prez, Associate Professor in Social Work at Malm University, conducted the interviews with representatives for the civil society. We would also like to thank Professor Carin Cuadra (Malm University), who worked with us on the grant application, and Professor Magnus Dahlstedt (Linkping University), Associate Professor Torun Elsrud (Linnaeus University) and Hamza Ibrahim, who all read drafts of the book. Additionally, we express our sincere gratitude to Malm Municipality, Mtesplats Otto (a meeting place for young migrants in Malm) and Ensamkommandes Frbund (a self-organized association of unaccompanied young people in Sweden), who helped us to get in touch with young individuals to follow during the course of the project.
