Riding Along in the Name of Equality: Everyday Demands on Refugee Children to Conform to Local Bodily Practices of Danish Egalitarianism

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among refugee families living in small communities in rural Denmark, the chapter focuses on the everyday encounter and negotiations of belonging between refugee children/adolescents and the surrounding Danish society. It examines the ways in which the children, in order to become locally accepted and included, have to maneuver within a duality of Danish norms regarding independence and collectivity. The analysis shows how the children are generally assumed to possess less individuality than their Danish peers, and it argues that the local demands imposed on them amount to an everyday schooling in Danish egalitarianism, central to which proves the mastering of particular bodily practices and routines, such as the everyday bodily technique of cycling. Paradoxically, the children and adolescents are expected to be made autonomous in exactly the same way as “everyone else”, turning the envisioned emancipation from discipline into an everyday disciplining in emancipation.