“Feeling strange” ‒ oral histories of newly arrived migrant children’s experiences of schooling in Denmark from the 1970s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based on oral history interviews with adults with a migration history who in their childhood entered into the Danish education system as “newcomers”, the article points out that the practised identity politics of schooling in the 1970s in Denmark for migrant students was operated through affective practices of “feeling strange”. The article explores how the fact that emotions of “feeling strange” have shaped newly arrived migrants’ schooling experience in Denmark since the 1970s connects to processes of racialisation. Rather than being connected only to “feeling new” and “unexpected”, the strangeness appears as connected to the broader affective hierarchies of racialisation in a way that makes it possible for new migrant students to feel strange in a “familiar institution” such as school. The study also displays that racialised emotions of feeling strange for migrants can easily re-emerge, influencing their educational and professional paths when remembered as adults. The effects of affective racialised practice learned in the school institution thus has severe consequences for the students because their access to school is shaped through minoritised positions, something that stays with them after leaving school.