Table Of ContentFRONTIERS
OF
BELONGING
Worlds in Crisis: Refugees, Asylum, and Forced Migration
Elizabeth Cullen Dunn and Georgina Ramsay, editors
FRONTIERS
OF
BELONGING
THE EDUCATION OF
UNACCOMPANIED
REFUGEE YOUTH
A N N I K A L E M S
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
© 2022 by Annika Lems
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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ISBN 978-0-253-06178-2 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-06179-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-06180-5 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. On Doing “Being Normal” 33
2. The Model(ed) Pupil 58
3. The Poster Child of Integration 81
4. The Unlucky Many 113
5. The Integration Pilot 148
6. Existential Balancing Acts 182
References 205
Index 223
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is the product of many collaborations. It owes its ethnographic
vitality to the sixteen young people from Eritrea, Guinea, and Ethiopia who gen-
erously allowed me to accompany them in their everyday pathways. Given the
often desperate legal, social, and emotional struggles they were involved in, I do
not take their readiness to let a researcher into their lives for granted. I share their
hope that foregrounding the difficulties they encountered in the Swiss asylum
and education landscape might contribute to improving the situation for future
generations of refugee youth. I am also thankful to the social pedagogues, teach-
ers, and legal guardians who often went at great lengths to accommodate my re-
search interests. If my assessments of the Swiss education landscape in this book
are often critical, this does not diminish the respect I have for the difficult social
and emotional work pedagogues have to perform. At a time when refugees’ ac-
cess to public resources has become a highly politicized question, they often find
themselves in impossible situations. While attempting to fulfill their educational
mandates, they constantly have to avoid stumbling into sociopolitical minefields.
Hopefully this book will offer a new and constructive perspective to pedagogues
involved in the education of migrant youth, in Switzerland and beyond.
The ethnographic fieldwork this book is based on emerged as part of a larger
research project entitled “Transnational Biographies of Education: Young Unac-
companied Asylum Seekers and their Navigation through Shifting Social Reali-
ties in Switzerland and Turkey.” The project was led by Sabine Strasser from the
University of Bern and Kathrin Oester from the University of Teacher Education
(PH Bern) and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project Num-
ber 156476). On the basis of Kathrin’s initial idea, we developed the project pro-
posal together, and while I was responsible for the research in Switzerland, Eda
vii
viii Acknowledgments
Elif Tibet conducted research in Turkey. The regular team meetings as well as the
workshops and conferences we organized as part of the project offered a fantastic
opportunity to discuss and think through my ethnographic observations. Many
of the ideas I present in the book are a product of this spirit of collaboration. I
thank Sabine and Kathrin for supporting me throughout the research phase and
encouraging me to publish my findings as a book. The interdisciplinary special
issue we coedited for the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (Lems, Oester,
and Strasser 2020; Lems 2020) formed an important point of departure for this
undertaking.
Throughout the three and a half years I was based at the Institute of Social
Anthropology at the University of Bern, I received invaluable support from my
colleagues there. I am particularly thankful to Darcy Alexandra, Danae Leiten-
berg, Gerhild Perl, Julia Rehsmann, and Veronika Siegl, who accompanied my
work in all its stages, from fieldwork to publication. I am also deeply indebted to
my friend and long-term collaborator Jelena Tošić. Our joint efforts to look at im/
mobility through an existential prism greatly influenced this book’s conceptual
angle. Some of these ideas were first published in a special issue that appeared
in the journal Soumen Anthropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Soci-
ety (Lems 2019; Lems and Tošić 2019). Furthermore, I want to thank Sebastien
Bachelet, Milena Belloni, Heath Cabot, Elaine Chase, Heike Drotbohm, Paolo
Gaibazzi, Laura Gilliam, Judith Hangartner, Edward Lowe, Hans Lucht, Fran-
cesca Meloni, Christine Moderbacher, Laura Otto, Henrik Vigh, Ulrika Wernesjö,
Agnieszka Pasieka, Julia Pauli, Josefine Raasch, Georgina Ramsay, Madeleine
Reeves, Samuli Schielke, and Michael Schnegg, who read and commented on
drafts of the chapters I presented at various conferences, seminars, and publica-
tion workshops.
The book would not have been possible without the support of the Max Planck
Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Since my move there in January 2019,
it has been a fantastic academic home, and the vibrant international research
community the institute accommodates has tremendously enriched my think-
ing and writing. A special thank you is owed to the members of my research
group, Antje Berger, Danae Leitenberger, Christine Moderbacher, Vera Wolter,
and Markus Wurzer. Our discussions about the everyday histories of exclusion
permeating the German-speaking Alpine region were an important motivator for
completing this book. Furthermore, I am indebted to the two anonymous review-
ers whose thoughtful readings helped sharpen my arguments and writing. Given
the many pressures academics are under in a neoliberal university landscape that
does not reward such acts of solidarity, I do not take their readiness to invest so
much time and energy in improving my work for granted. Finally, I want to thank
Acknowledgments ix
Elizabeth Cullen Dunn and Georgina Ramsay, the editors of the Worlds in Crisis
book series, as well as Allison Chaplin and Sophia Hebert, the acquisition editors
at Indiana University Press, for their generous advice and support. Georgina’s
encouragement a few years ago to think about my ethnographic data in terms of
a book project formed the very beginning of this journey. I thank her for believing
in me and my work and for incentivizing me to keep going.
Last but not least, this book would have never come into the world if it were
not for the exceptional support of my husband, Paul Reade. He did not just pa-
tiently put up with my writing moods but often put aside his own work to read,
edit, and comment on my chapters. By now he has read the book so many times
that he must be truly thankful to get rid of it. I cannot thank him enough for his
help and support.
