Becoming Citizen: Spatial and Expressive Acts when Strangers Move In

This article examines the becoming citizen of a community of refugees in Denmark. Through ethnographic field observations taking place during 2017 the case study follows the everyday life of a community of refugees from their arrival in an out-of-use retirement home in an upper-class residential area in the town of Hørsholm. The article investigates how becoming citizen can be understood as spatial and expressive negotiations between the refugees and the local society. In here we see negotiations of citizenship practiced between the expressed acts of the refugees and the framing conditions – political, social, cultural, material – of local citizenship. We argue that the everyday life and becoming of the migrant potentially holds the capacity to re-formulate and add to the idea of citizenship, not being merely about obtaining Danish citizenship as a civic right, but also covering the rights to express oneself and connect oneself to society through multiple modes of becoming.