A town called Bygdaby (original) (raw)

Refugees’ Encounters With Nordic Rural Areas–Darkness, Wind and “Hygge”!

Frontiers in Sociology, 2021

The paper investigates how refugees settled in rural Norway and Denmark experience and interact with their new rural places of residence. Theoretically, the paper finds inspiration in “phenomenology of practices” (Simonsen, Prog. Hum. Geogr., 2012, 37, 10–26), which emphasizes the bodily and sensory experiences of daily life that spur feelings of, for example, “orientation” or “disorientation”. The empirical material is based on fieldwork and qualitative interviews with refugees and local volunteers in 2016/2017/2019 in small towns in the rural north of Norway and rural Denmark. There are several differences between the Norwegian and Danish rural areas, in relation to distances, climate and population density. Nonetheless, the ways in which the rural areas are experienced from within, by refugees settled there, show surprisingly many similarities. Many of the informants, in both the Norwegian and Danish cases, initially expressed frustration at being placed in rural areas without ha...