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.

Social service for sale. On social work in times of procurement Market reforms within the Swedish welfare sector have paved the way for models based on buying and selling welfare services. Public procurement constitutes a hub for commissioning and providing social services. The aim of this article is to explore how social work is shaped within a procurement context. Attention is directed to how social workers providing procured services describe their work. The empirical material consists of interviews with 16 providers of social services within different areas of a procured social work. The results show how procurement shapes the provision of social work, in terms of specifications of time and quantity, a quantification of the work performed with clients and how the framework of procurement shapes the client as a commission and a case. It is further shown how providers compensate for and deal with the framework of procured social work to meet the clients' needs. The results raise questions about the possibilities for procured social work regarding the services' demarcation, specialisation, and time frame.

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.

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.

A debate on masculinity and immigration rose across Europe in 2015 after an incident with sexual harassments taking place in Cologne, Germany. The incident refuelled a debate positioning unaccompanied young men as a possible threat. This article is based on a research project where we during this time ethnographically followed 20 young men, having arrived in Sweden as ‘unaccompanied’ minors. The aim is to examine how the young men themselves talk about, reflect on and negotiate masculinity and gender during this period. The article concludes that masculinity cannot be approached as something stable easily being inherited or transferred from one’s origins. One difference for ‘unaccompanied’ young men is how conflicts or tensions emerging in relation to issues of gender and masculinity tend to be interpreted differently, and publicly, putting the young men in a ‘gendered situation of questioning’.