The Integration of Caribbean Migrants in Danish Society
PROJECT IS COMPLETED
Project period: March 2011 - June 2014
This project focused on Caribbean immigrants in Denmark, an ethnic minority that has a tradition for cultural openness and network building across ethnic and racial boundaries.
It examined how they have experienced integration into Danish society during a period when Danish views and practices towards immigrants have changed markedly.
Integration studies have tended to focus on major groups of immigrants settled in ethnic clusters in urban areas. A significant theme has been the supposed tendency for these groups to develop ‘parallel societies’ that are separate from the surrounding society, and the social, economic and cultural problems believed to emerge as a result of this. The undercurrent in much of this research, in other words, has been the assumption that immigrant groups by nature prefer to stick to their ‘own’ group.
By looking at a group of people, Caribbean immigrants, who display many of the qualities Danes associate with well-integrated immigrants, the project directed focus away from the tendency to treat isolation as endogen to immigrants, and considered, instead, the societal conditions of integration and the way it was experienced by the immigrants themselves.
The fieldwork was primarily based on life story interviews with immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean, who at the time of the research comprised approximately 500, half of whom lived in the Copenhagen area.
Professor Karen Fog Olwig, now emeritus
The project was part of a larger, inter-disciplinary research project 'Social Cohesion and Ethnic Diversity', funded by the Danish Council of Strategic Research.
Analysis of the Caribbean immigrants’ life stories showed that they have been placed in an ambiguous position in Denmark as foreigners, perceived to manifest a new form of diversity in the society. They have therefore been received with both curiosity and skepticism.
They have been treated, on the one hand, as interesting, exotic and/or artistic resources who can offer a positive contribution to society and, on the other, as unfamiliar, uncanny and perhaps even improper elements who pose a threat to Danish society.
The balance between these disparate notions of foreigners and diversity has moved from a relatively positive to a more negative reception, as Danish perceptions of the figure of the immigrant have changed with shifting economic conditions, public debates and political agendas.
Publications
Olwig, Karen Fog (2019) Diversitetens mange ansigter og konsekvenser: caribiske indvandrere i det danske samfund, pp. 133-152 in Social sammenhængskraft: Begreb og virkelighed, ed. T.G. Jensen, G. Schmidt & K. Vitus, Samfundslitteratur.
Olwig, Karen Fog (2018) Migration as Adventure: Narrative Self-representation among Caribbean Migrants in Denmark. Ethnos, Journal of Anthropology 83(1): 156-171.
Dalgas, Karina and Karen Fog Olwig (2015) Local and Transnational Care Relations: Relatedness and Family Practice among Au Pairs in Denmark. Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs. 15(4): 469-484.
Olwig, Karen Fog [2015) Caribiske migranter i Danmark: Eventyrlige rejsefortællinger og danske hverdagsliv, pp. 181-200 in Mobilitet og tilknytning: Migrantliv i et globaliseret Danmark, K. Valentin, K.F. Olwig, red. Aarhus Universitetsforlag.
Olwig, Karen Fog (2015) The duplicity of diversity: Caribbean immigrants in Denmark. Ethnic and Racial Studies 38(7): 1104-1119.
Olwig, Karen Fog (2013) Notions and practices of difference: an epilogue on the ethnography of diversity. Identities - Global Studies in Culture and Power 20(4): 471-79.
Professor Emeritus Karen Fog Olwig
Email: karen.fog.olwig@anthro.ku.dk
Telephone: +45 35 32 34 79
The project was funded by:
The Integration of Caribbean Migrants in Danish Society has received funding from the Danish Council of Strategic Research as part of the research project Social Cohesion and Ethnic Diversity.
Project: The Integration of Caribbean Migrants in Danish Society
Principal investigator: Karen Fog Olwig
Start: March 2011
End: June 2014