Navigating citizenship: Experiences of African families living in Middle-Norway.

Citizenship has been said to involve negotiation over and access to the exercise of rights. To discuss how interview data from eight immigrant families to Norway shed light on their negotiation of citizenship, we use as a lens concepts of “situated learning” and “legitimate peripheral participation” (Lave & Wenger 2003). Situated learning describes generative processes integral to open ended communities of practice. Legitimate peripheral participation focus on the processes through which newcomers become fully participating members in established communities of practice. At the micro level of specific situations, positions of self and other - explicit, implicit, and with moral connotations - are negotiated. In the course of their immigration narratives, adult members in our study described how they interacted with bureaucrats, professionals, colleagues and neighbors in formal and informal contexts. Over time, they deepened their understanding of dominating Norwegian cultural habits and values and they developed skills and resources necessary to access welfare benefits and markets of labor and housing. This illustrates a movement from peripheral to fully participating positions. As part of this movement, they came to terms with what they saw as beneficial in Norwegian society and what they did not appreciate. In cases where they found established Norwegian practices lacking, they did however not find that African perspectives were received as valid and worthy of discussion. Rather they felt disempowered in ambiguous peripheral positions in terms of their exercise of rights.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (2003) Situert læring og andre tekster. København: Hans Reitzels forlag