Everyday negotiations : Agency and structure in the everyday-life of women seeking asylum in Norway

Seeking asylum is commonly defined by long and undetermined waits and significant uncertainty, which several applicants perceive as disempowering. A growing body of research highlights that applicants encounter their agency significantly limited, which leads to developing dependency on the state, this may often lead to passivity as a result. In public debate and the media, and occasionally in academic literature as well, people seeking asylum and refuge tend to be portrayed as victims of their circumstances. This portrayal has turned into a stereotype of refugees and asylum seekers as almost powerless, without any agency. With the desire to reveal a more nuanced picture of the asylum-seeking process and the refugee experience, this thesis delves into the multiple ways in which women who have sought asylum in Norway negotiate the extensive structural limitations they come across in the process, and how they find avenues to enact their agency. The thesis pays particular attention to everyday, mundane practices, aspirations for the future, and the role of religious beliefs and practices in the women’s early stages of arrival to Norway. The thesis draws on two phases of fieldwork where I conducted individual qualitative interviews complemented with several hours of informal conversations and observations with women seeking asylum in Norway. The thesis is primarily a contribution to the research on agency and structure in contexts with significant limitations, such as refugee and asylum contexts. I argue that, in such contexts, agency is visible in small, everyday negotiations in relation to everyday practices, including everyday forms of religion and everyday identity struggles. Each article in this thesis illustrates a different way in which the women negotiate the structures and find ways to enact their everyday agency in various spheres of their life. In this way, the thesis highlights the importance of paying attention to everyday mundane practices, especially in situations of significant structural limitations. An emphasis is placed on the pertinence of examining the religious sphere of people’s lives, as it may not only contribute to their resilience but also to their agency in more general terms- given its central role in self-identification practices and dealing with stigmatized identities. Aside from making it possible to notice the interplay between agency and structure, it also provides understanding as to how the various contexts in which people find themselves, influence their aspirations, and how these aspirations are pursued. Finally, this thesis shows that asserting aspirations, particularly, albeit not exclusively, in asylum and refugee contexts, may be seen as a practice of self-identification used to deal with stigmatized identities