Doing inclusion as counter-conduct: Navigating the paradoxes of organizing for refugee and migrant inclusion

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Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2024-03

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Language

en

Pages

30

Series

Human Relations, Volume 77, issue 3, pp. 299-328

Abstract

Are organizational projects for refugee and migrant inclusion always trapped with the logic of exclusion and inequality that they seek to dismantle? Existing literature on critical diversity and inclusion studies has demonstrated how the “doing” of inclusion in organizations tends to come with paradoxical effects: well-intended efforts to include migrants and refugees construct them as vulnerable, non-autonomous subjects who need help, within a hierarchical order that is taken for granted. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how three civil society organizations (CSOs) navigate these paradoxical effects and the unduly constraining power relations involved through practices that we theorize as counter-conduct against the pastoral government of a national refugee and migrant integration regime. The analysis identifies three practices of counter-conduct through which organizations “do inclusion differently”: contesting constraining categorizations, problematizing hierarchical power relations, and questioning the assimilationist goals and principles of the integration regime. We argue that through continuous critique and renegotiation of the ways in which boundaries of inclusion/exclusion are drawn within the integration regime, organizations work toward conditions in which power relations remain fluid and allow for strategies to alter them.

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Keywords

counter-conduct, pastoral power, Refugees, inclusion-exclusion, diversity, equality and inclusion

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Citation

Kangas-Muller, L, Eräranta, K & Moisander, J 2024, ' Doing inclusion as counter-conduct: Navigating the paradoxes of organizing for refugee and migrant inclusion ', Human Relations, vol. 77, no. 3, pp. 299-328 . https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267221145399