Storying Home in Policy Addressing Migrants

Following the past ten years of public debate on immigration, belonging and integration in Denmark, the notion of home seems to stand out as a pivotal point of struggle in political, socio-material as well as cultural terms. Thus, this paper raises the preliminary argument that the immigrant figure seems to challenge and provoke a majoritarian sedentary understanding of home, which is bound politically, socio-materially, and culturally to one place within nationally demarcated borders. In order to interrogate this argument, the paper revisits the selected policy fields of housing, integration and immigration control and their social documentary practices of policymaking (Riles 2006), which in empirical terms include white papers, government action plans, responses to hearing requests, legislation, and ministerial orders. Such a data material – including interviews with policymakers and administrators – allows for an examination of semiotic struggles over home in response to global migration. In other words, the paper intends to identify the meaning-making process in policies addressing the home-migration nexus as a social problem. It does so by addressing semiosis as representation of the social world and oneself in a practice constitutive of reality (Fairclough 2012). The semiotic focus is operationalized with the help of narratology (Czarniawska 2010), by which this paper explores what the narrative turn in policy analysis (Bansel 2015; Fischer 2003) may offer migration research that bridges the arts and social sciences. As such, this paper offers a methodological discussion and experimentation of how to work with policy narratives as both research object, research method, and a mode of conveying research results (Freeman 2017). In particular, the paper will exam the analytical strategy of emplotment as a contiguity-based intervention that develops the storying of home in response to migration by paying attention to connective operations in disparate data sources. References Bansel, P. (2015). A narrative approach to policy analysis. In K. N. Gulson, M. Clarke, & E. Bendix Petersen (Eds.), Education policy and contemporary theory: Implications for research (pp. 183–194). Routledge. Czarniawska, B. (2010). The uses of narratology in social and policy studies. Critical Policy Studies, 4(1), 58–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171003715002 Fairclough, N. (2012). Kritisk diskursanalyse: En tekstsamling. Hans Reitzel. Fischer, F. (2003). Reframing public policy: Discursive politics and deliberative practices. Oxford University Press. Freeman, M. (2017). Modes of thinking for qualitative data analysis. Routledge. Riles, A. (2006). [Deadlines]. In A. Riles (Ed.), Documents. Artifacts of modern knowledge (pp. 71–92). University of Michigan Press.