Everyday Citizenship and Refugee Employment on the Islands of Scandinavia

(Martin Ledstrup, University of Southern Denmark)

Martin Ledstrup is currently undertaking a post.doc project – sponsored by the strategic research funds at SDU – on refugee employment in rural areas of the Nordic welfare state. The project researches, through a close collaboration with Red Cross Denmark, how the everyday learning of ‘work’ and ‘place’ lead mutually into each other among refugees and local employers on the depopulating islands of Scandinavia. By invoking the ‘island’ as a naturally demarcated and intensively rural social setting, the project takes the exploration of culture between water and land – or what is increasingly known as ‘the blue humanities’ – into the social sciences. Specifically, the project connects refugee employment on the island with the formation of subjectivity, particularly through contemporary debates about abandonment, precarity, and learning. Martin Ledstrup wrote his PhD about the interaction between Arab migrants and local citizens in peripheral areas of the Emirati welfare state.