16/3 Becoming Part of Society in Rural Norway
IMER Hybrid Seminar:
Becoming Part of Society in Rural Norway
Time: Tuesday 16th of March 2021, 11.00 – 12.00
Place: Bergen Global, Jekteviksbakken 31, Bergen
About the seminar
How do people become part of a community in rural Norway? How do they talk about their experiences with their own and others’ ‘integration’? What role do mundane encounters play and what other topics are revealed in these narratives?
Angelina Penner from NTNU, discusses her PhD research which is based on an ethnographic fieldwork in a small coastal Norwegian town. In this study integration is not understood as a political goal, which is measurable through statistics and achievable through formal policies and structures.
Instead, in 30 biographical interviews and numerous notes, Angelina explores the rather banal moments in which her interlocutors describe feeling more or less part of the community. Frustrations of not being able to make friends in a place where everyone seems to know everyone and narratives about the Norwegian “dugnad” reveal that not only immigrants and refugees are affected by an ideal of integration, which is connected to and perpetuates ideas of homogeneity and racialization.
Angelina Penner is a PhD candidate at the department for Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at NTNU. She studied social anthropology and sociology in Heidelberg and received her master’s degree in Anthropology of Development at the University in Bergen. Her current study “Becoming part of society: immigrant integration through everyday interactions in rural Norway” is part of the NFR funded project “Living Integration: At the Crossroads between Official Policies, Public Discourses and Everyday Practices”.