The Norwegian government is committed to research informed policymaking. An expression of this commitment is government mandated research (”oppdragsforskning”), which has led to a strong engagement of the Norwegian research community in policy development. Given the currently higher number of refugees to Norway, “integration” has become a political and policy priority as well as significant research topic.
The principle behind integration policies, as a specific form of governance, is to aid refugees in becoming well-functioning members of Norwegian society. For integration policies to match the needs of refugees who come to Norway, the state bureaucracy produces and seeks to organize significant amounts of information about them. Such categorizations are fundamental to the functions of modern states and bureaucrats at AID and IMDi are preoccupied with using more inclusive terminology.
However, extensive research has demonstrated that the process of producing “population groups” and “social issues”, including in relation to “integration”, through various knowledge practices can be inadvertently harmful, by fostering negative stereotypes, pre-determining policy solutions, and possibly leading to discrimination (Rytter 2018, Rytter & Pedersen 2014). Thus, it is necessary to examine how such representations are formed, identify the assumptions that shape them, and consider the policy outcomes they promote. Given these tensions inherent to government mandated research, and as researchers conducting such research in the field of migration and integration, we will collect collect and examine government mandated research calls concerning integration over a five-year period and ask: What representations of refugees are produced through government mandated research calls, and what problematizations of social issues do these representations reflect?