From refugee to academic : Bosnian refugees’ reflections on their journey to higher education in Sweden

This study is about a group of war refugees that migrated to Sweden from Bosnia and Hercegovina and their experiences and thoughts surrounding the process of integration and their journey to higher studies. The aim of the study is to discover what prepossessed qualities made this ethnical group so adaptable to the Swedish society in the case of integration and furthermore to see if it’s anything that can be replicated in future immigration waves that arrive. Most of the research conducted on this field in Sweden is limited to quantitative data. This study is based on qualitative data, the empirical material consists of interviews with seven war immigrants that have finished a higher education in Sweden. The informants own narrative and personal experiences are analysed through Bourdieu’s theories surrounding capital, field and habitus and act as the theoretical framework in analysing the collected data. The results of the study show that there are great similarities in valued forms of capital between the immigrant’s home country in this case Bosnia and Hercegovina and Sweden. The study also demonstrates the importance of community, where all the informants were helped by previous immigrants from Bosnia that arrived during the work migration to Sweden in 1960-1970. The help of their fellow countrymen helped them align themselves with the valued forms of Capital and helped them guide their way through the social norms and achieve higher studies and with that fully integrate within the Swedish society.