“Feeling Strange” ‒ Newly arrived migrant children’s experiences of welfare state integration politics through schooling in Denmark in the 1970s

The paper examines how the emotions of ‘feeling strange’ have shaped migrants’ schooling experience in Denmark in the 1970s, where the children of the guest workers entered the school of the welfare state.
Based on oral history interviews with migrants with what was later by Danmarks Statistik (Statistics Denmark) defined as a “non-western background” who entered Denmark and the Danish education system as children, the presentation explores how the identity politics of schooling in the 1970s-Denmark for migrant students operated through racialized affective practices of schooling.
A key finding is that affective practices of lived and practiced welfare state education politics appear as linked to racialization in a way that makes it possible for new migrant students to feel strange in a type of institution already well-known to them, namely “school”.
Furthermore, racialized affective practices of schooling seem to happen across different socio-geographical spaces: they are not only taking place in e. g. province towns where the interviewed students were among the few newcomers, if not the only ones, but also in urban areas with an extensive history of settling migrants and as many newly arrived migrant students that so called reception classes (“modtagelsesklasser”) could be organized. Rather than being simply connected to ‘feeling new’ and ‘unexpected’, learning a new language etc., the strangeness seems connected to broader affective hierarchies of racialization being part of lived welfare state politics of integration through schooling.