Conference Program

The object of the study concerns interventions aimed at newly arrived highly educated migrants in Sweden. I have investigated participants attending a so-called ‘establishment program’, with the optimistic designation ‘The fast track’.

From a theoretical point, the individuals’ encounter with the establishment program, ‘The fast track’, is seen through the lens of Abdelmalek Sayad: the immigrant must be understood in relation to his or her previous emigrant status (Sayad 1999). As Sayad clearly points out, the immigrant is above all a migrant whose social history sets the conditions for immigration. Pierre Bourdieus’s concept habitus (Bourdieu 1980), is used in the study to understand the forced habitus transformation that migrants experience during their establishment in a new community.

The empirical material consists of 60 interviews with newly arrived academics. The time during ‘The fast track’ invoked to a great extent their shared experience of not being Swedish. ‘The emigrant’ was given little space or none at all. For the participants, their educational background is important, which can be understood in terms of a matter of honour, where education is the resource that makes one honorable and that one hopes will be recognised in the new country. The participants wish to rehabilitate their cultural capital with the emigrant’s feeling that the background is important, but learn to cope with being just an immigrant. In general, education is closely connected to cultural values and traditions, but this link is here decoupled, which leads to a process of misrecognition of the immersion of education in culture.

To handle a group of individuals from different parts of the world, with various needs, the solution becomes an acculturation process in ‘the Swedishness’ which at the same time means a deculturation process for the migrants, in short a forced habitus transformation process.