“Well, in next week, he’ll be gone”: Reflections on momentariness as an objective societal condition, and how it can be an subjectively important and limiting condition for refugee children in Denmark

This contribution suggests conceptualizing ‘momentariness’ as an objective societal condition, with significant subjective importance for refugee and migrant children in Denmark, linked to possibilities of belonging and care. Through concrete empirical and situated examples, the contribution reflects on ways political and historical conflicts and the current political shift towards return policies, make up unequal structural conditions and significant limitations related to care and inclusion , for refugee children and their families in their everyday lives in Denmark.
Working methodologically and analytically with children’s perspectives as the starting point of the exploration of four Syrian refugee children’s conduct of everyday life,‘momentariness’ emerged as an empirically central phenomenon, which seemed highly significant for their possibilities of taking part and belonging in the care- arrangement situated in the sociomaterial practices at the daycare. The phenomenon herewith points to (restricted) participation and concrete possibilities to influence and transform the social practices the children take part in.
Conceptually, ‘momentariness’ can be linked to a subject’s ability to expand individual and joint conduct of lives. This point is made drawing on German-Danish critical psychological conceptualizations of dialectic relations of societal structures and individual subjects. It conceives of societal structural conditions as significant, in sociomaterially different and varied ways, depending on the standpoint of the subject in and across various action contexts. But how could this perspective be developed further to help shed more light on the complex (and exclusive) relations between state, situated care-arrangements and migrant or refugee child?