553 FORMING IDENTITIES IN RESIDENTIAL CARE FOR

Manoeuvring between social work and peer groups The general goal of Danish residential care institutions with a therapeutic objective is to change children’s behaviour and redirect their identity formation. This goal is pursued through an individualized focus on development. Dynamics of the resident group is rarely targeted directly in the pedagogical work. This article challenges the implicit understanding that social work is the primary source of identity transformation and that peer group interaction is mainly an obstacle to overcome. On the contrary, this article argues that learning about the social dynamics of the children’s group is a precondition for understanding how social work influences individual children. Many welfare institutions for children in the western world have a civilizing project in educating children and shaping their identities. This focus is parti-cularly explicit in residential care institutions with therapeutic purposes for children who have social, emotional and psychological problems. The main goal of these institutions is to educate, initiate change in behaviour and self-perception and thereby influence identity processes. The process is undertaken through social pedagogy, that is, various social pedagogical activities and approaches initiated by professionals. However, when children are placed in residential care, they are not only exposed to the professional staff’s peda-gogical initiatives, they are also placed in a particular social setting with a group of other children and adults with whom they interact and connect on an everyday basis (Emond, 2000, 2004; Polsky, 1962; Stokholm, 2009). Everyday social relations and interaction with significant others – especially peers – are important sources of self-perception and self-management and hence identity formation (Adler and Adler, 2001; Corsaro, 2005; Frønes, 1995). Taking an anthropological perspective, the aim of this article is to analyse and discuss the important question that arises: in an institutional setting explicitly focused on influencing identity formation and on teaching childre