Managing Migrant Lives through Home – a narrative documentary ethnography of immigration and integration policy in Denmark, Sweden and the UK

Home and home-making are increasingly regarded as crucial topics within migration research and policy debates, as concepts of home articulate the contested politics of migration, integration and belonging. While much scholarship recognises home as a multi-faceted concept, policy discourses tend to regard it as a singular, nationally bounded space. The analytical ambition of this paper is guided by an interest in how home is narrated in policy-making addressing migrants in Denmark, Sweden and the UK between 2010 and 2020, within which migrant homes and home-making seem to appear as sites of biopolitical intervention and management of migrant lives. This paper also has the ambition to discuss and advance a methodology of approaching documentary policy studies in an ethnographic manner (Padovan-Özdemir 2020; Riles 2006) and by means of a narrative approach. Accordingly, we consider the challenges of reconstructing policy narratives from multiple discursive sources operating within distinctive political landscapes and explore the potential of narrative policy analysis as a methodological tool in migration research. Our research builds upon understandings of narrative as constituted through processes of emplotment, encompassing political visions, problem definitions, solutions and characters, as well as ideographs around which the storytelling (r)evolves (Bansel 2015; Miller 2019). We apply narrative analysis to the policy cycle, examining how narratives of the home-migrant-nexus are sedimented in government platforms, white papers, commissioned reports and legislation. Finally, we discuss the benefits and challenges of working with policy narratives as research object and method in migration research.