“That will be your home” : Resettlement preparations for children and youth from the Horn of Africa

Sammanfattning: This thesis analyzes how children and youth being resettled from Kenya and Sudan were prepared for their upcoming resettlement to Sweden, through cultural orientation programs (COPs). COPs are held for refugees who have been granted permanent Swedish residence and are undergoing resettlement to Sweden. The Swedish Migration Board, in charge of resettlement, carries out COPs as a means to inform and prepare refugees for the move to Sweden. This thesis is based on ethnographic work carried out during COPs held in Kenya and Sudan in 2011. Through video-based observation of the meetings between the Swedish delegations and children and youth, current thesis examines what notions of resettlement and refugeeness inform the delegations work, and how does the children’s agency come about during these meetings? The thesis includes three articles. Article 1 examines how the delegations make use of images in order to establish certain ideas of Sweden and the ideal citizen specifically tailored for the group being resettled. Article 2 explores children’s agency within the COPs, focusing on how the children and youth manage the meetings and sometimes resisting being positioned in certain ways by the delegations. Article 3 analyzes how notions of gender equality are drawn upon by the delegations during their work, a topic frequently highlighted by the delegations in various implicit and dilemmatic ways. The thesis shows how the delegations’ work is carried out in paradoxical ways. Their quest to bring forth the ideal future as a means to instill hope among the children simultaneously ends up categorizing them as different and as others. The representatives draw  n ideas that the children need to be socialized in order to be incorporated into another “us”.