How to do research on immigrant integration?

Integration is a key concept in migration research, yet its meaning and analytical value has since long been contested and debated. One line of critique has been that the concept is too vague and that studies of integration tend to rest on unquestioned assumptions about who is to be integrated into what. Another critique holds that the concept – also when used by researchers - is normative and assimilationist. Recently, claims have been voiced that when using integration as analytical lens, we are in fact contributing to constructing the migrant ‘other’, and thus to sustaining racist and classed structures of power and inequality (Schinkel 2018). At the same time, as migration researchers we continuously encounter the concept of integration both as policies, and as a socio-cultural ideal that our interlocutors are grappling with in their everyday lives. How, then, can we do research on immigrant ‘integration’ in our academic endeavors? Leila Hadj Abdou (2019) suggests that we turn the lens around and study instead the ideas and understandings that are articulated through the concept of integration. In this workshop we will present research that explores meaning-making processes related to integration by studying how ‘integration’ is narrated, understood and experienced by different interlocutors in different contexts. We invite papers that takes such empirical research as a starting point to reflect on conceptual, methodological, and/or analytical dilemmas of doing research on immigrant integration. The aim is to open up for critical reflections on the various practices of doing integration research, including the work researchers do to avoid the pitfalls of reproducing migrants as ‘others’. Questions we wish to explore include: Which meanings do different subjects ascribe to the policies and practices of immigrant integration, and how can we fruitfully study these? Can research on immigrant integration produce new understandings of experiences with settlement, interaction between newcomers and the host society, and the social and cultural change that follows immigration, and if so; how?