Refugee Employment and Settlement in Norway and Sweden

Zoom link: https://uni- sydney.zoom.us/j/85987941908

For refugees employment is one of the biggest concerns when it comes to resettlement. Employment is also one of the key markers of settlement ‘success’. What role do varying literacy levels and career skills-sets - acquired in a culturally rich yet culturally distant country - play when it comes to refugee resettlement? This question is examined through the lens of two country cases - Norway and Sweden - both of which have resettled refugees throughout the post WWII period and particularly so in recent years.

Norway - Integration and Active Citizenship for Low-Literate Adult Refugees in Norway (INTERACT)

Poor literacy is considered an important challenge to democratic societies. In recent years, Norway has resettled a growing number of low-literate adult refugees. Municipal integration services report that they are limited in facilitating the goal of integration for adult refugees. Norwegian studies have found literacy to be linked to health and wellbeing, and work-life participation, making this group particularly at risk of unemployment and marginalization. This presentation is based on findings from a “pre-project” where municipal integration services and social entrepreneurs involved in integration work were interviewed coupled with a brief outline of the recently funded InterAct research project. The overall aim of InterAct project is to strengthen and promote the work of public services while fostering intersectoral collaboration to support low-literate adult refugees, thereby improving integration outcomes, in the interest of an inclusive and democratic society.

Sweden - Career Rewind: Professional Trajectories of Pharmacists with a Refugee Background

This presentation conceptualises and examines the notion of the ‘career rewind’ that highly skilled refugees experience after arrival in a receiving country. Rather than a career interruption, career hiatus or deferred progression, the presentation argues that a career rewind takes place. The rewind entails, among others, re-taking courses, re-acquiring professional knowledge and skills, and recertification in the case of registered professions. The empirical material was collected in 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with pharmacists with a refugee background in Sweden. The findings provide insights into pharmacists’ experiences of the career rewind in different places and their attempts to “unwind” the rewind.

Biographies

Linda Dyrlid has a PhD in Social Anthropology and is employed as Associate Professor at the Department of Social Work at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research experience includes topics such as work migration, refugees, human trafficking, transnationalism, inclusion and marginalization. She has extensive experience in teaching and supervision in topics related to diversity, mobility and work inclusion. Her most recent publication in this field is the book chapter “Consequences of categorization: Refugees' and labour migrants' experiences with integration policy in Norway” (Dyrlid and Sætermo, in print 2023) in Migration and mobility (Villa and Valestrand (eds) in print 2023)

Micheline van Riemsdijk is an Associate Professor of Human Geography at Uppsala University. She has conducted research on highly skilled migration, the governance of international migration, and employment issues. Micheline is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Otago’s College of Education to study refugee employment policies in New Zealand and Sweden. Micheline also leads a three-year research project on the labor market integration of highly skilled refugees in Sweden, funded by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (https://www.kultgeog.uu.se/research- en/researchprojects/integration/).