Going to school and getting an education can both be important and tenuous for young people who, because they are refugees, are experiencing a precarious and fragile life. It is often considered an effective catalyst for integration, for future success in life, and as a possible haven. At the same time, schooling and education aimed at newly arrived refugee children and young people are rife with challenges. In this chapter, we use ethnographic data to investigate how young unaccompanied people talk about school and school life in relation to racism, and administrative violence. How the young people act, react to, and reflect on their education and schools are affected by how they are perceived and treated by society at large. Being labelled, questioned, and rejected can be considered elements of administrative violence. Another related form of violence affecting these young people is racist violence, both physical violence and violence expressed through institutions, such as schools. We argue that the school system must adapt to these young people’s wishes, experiences, and challenges, without homogenizing and reproducing inequalities and violence aimed at them. Further, racism must be addressed and fought methodically, on the policy level and locally within the schools.

The article examines how unaccompanied young refugees in Sweden relate to and talk about their everyday lives and life plans during a time of transition from childhood to adulthood. We regard them as navigators and emotional beings embodying social situations, relationships and sentiments in their habitus throughout their lives affecting their life plans and acting to build capital in social fields. Their narratives show that they all have a life plan. However, disruptions and adjustments of life plans occur, often related to their birth families, deeply embodied in their habitus, to their everyday life, but also to socio-economic and political contexts both globally and locally. Their position as young 'unaccompanied minors' is fragile when it comes to realizing future goals. A stable social and economic structure, stability capital, appears to contribute to possibilities of adapting to or maintaining sustainable life plans.

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. 

In this article, we listen to young people having arrived in Sweden as unaccompanied minors, in relation to how they talk about and relate to religion, belief and practice. There is still a lack of research focusing on these young people's own narratives and experiences in their everyday life. This is particularly noteworthy since this category of young people, and especially those with a 'Muslim heritage', have received increased attention both in research and in public discourse. For two years, we have ethnographically followed 20 young people with asylum status in Sweden, who all arrived as unaccompanied minors and all came from areas of the world where Islam is the dominant religion. The conclusions are that these young people both need to navigate and are affected by the current political and social context questioning Muslim people, and that this is the case regardless of their own personal relationship to Islam. Further, religious faith needs to be related to its social and emotional embodiments, since it is here religious belief, shifts, changes and resistance, take place. Finally, we discuss how physical, temporal and social distance makes it possible to create other identities, and other ways of being religious or not.

Aims: Open drug scenes can be found in most major cities in Europe. Despite often being closed down by the police, the drug community continues to exist, and the drug scenes reappear elsewhere. There seem to be forces that hold these communities together, regardless of the substances used. In this study we explore whether interaction rituals have an impact on the decision by people to stay in the drug scene or to return after quitting their drug use. Method: In this ethnographic study, one of the researchers spent time in an open drug scene in a Norwegian city over a one-year span and gathered data on the human interactions hosted by this scene. In addition, the researcher interviewed eight people from the scene to obtain greater insight into their lives and perceptions of the scene, drawing on Goffman's and Collins's theories about rituals. Findings: Three themes emerged. First, drug users bonded as a group and resisted what they called "normal people" passing by. Second, users demonstrated the importance of sharing drugs and services and adhering to the scene's rules of conduct. The third and final theme is the focus of attention and the production of emotional energy. Conclusion: The experience of being outsiders and the need to hide some of their activities seemed to make it necessary for persons in the drug scene to have their own rules and rituals. These rules and rituals can be regarded as "interaction rituals". They provide participants with the symbols of group membership, emotional energy, and group solidarity. This makes it hard to leave the scene and might explain why those who do often return.

This article investigates how ‘unaccompanied children’ in Sweden experience one part of the reception system – the social workers – in the context of their everyday life. The aim is to describe and analyse how these young people view and experience social workers and their relation to them, as well as their perceptions regarding the social worker’s nature. The article is drawn from a research project where 20 ‘unaccompanied children’ participated for over two years. During this period, the researchers have met with the young people continuously doing interviews, observations and informal conversations once a month. The results indicate that the social worker tends to become something of a bystander, a representative of the authorities who has played no active role in the young people’s everyday life, except for when they ‘pop up’ to make a decision affecting their everyday life. The social worker becomes a bystander with power. This is discussed in relation to situational ethics and the importance of building relationships and trust to service users in general and to ‘unaccompanied children’ in particular.

Kapitlet hanterar olika utmaningar som det svenska sociala arbetet står inför. Vad behövs för att åstadkomma ett solidariskt socialt arbete?

The chapter deals with different challenges in Swedish social work. What may be needed in order to create a solidaric social work?

Året var 2013 när Andy, som 13-åring, för första gången satte sina fötter på svensk mark. Platsen var den då ganska nybyggda Citytunneln, i Malmös underjord. Via rulltrappor rörde han sig upp mot stadens ytskikt, Malmö Centralstation och Malmö centrum. Unga migranter har de senaste åren stått i fokus för den mediala och politiska debatten i Sverige och Europa. Det gäller särskilt de unga som anländer utan vårdnadshavare, den grupp som kommit att kallas för ensamkommande. Rörelser, gränser och liv handlar om just dem, om 20 unga människor som vid ett stort antal intervjuer berättar om sina vardagsliv. Från resan genom gränsernas Europa till den situation de befinner sig i idag. I berättelserna inryms både känslor av maktlöshet och frustration, av att misstänkliggöras, och av att betraktas som ensamkommande och att fastna i kategorin. Men också, genom möten med andra, känslor av hopp i att uppfattas som fullvärdiga och komplexa människor, att kunna navigera mot framtiden.