Towards the polysemic fabrication of integration: Relating hegemony-critical theories ‘from above’ and actor-centred approaches ‘from below’

The concept of ‘migrant integration’ – a cornerstone in international migration studies – has been subjected to extensive critique and analysis. Against the background of the multiplicity of critiques, this article aims to review and consolidate the critique’s central arguments to develop an outline of the domination-critical, iterative, and constructivist concept of ‘doing integration’. In developing this approach, the article reviews and interrelates multiple bodies of literature. With the domination-critical scholarship it reflects the discourse-theoretic, coloniality-sensitive, and Marxist writings on integration governance to identify multiple sites, logics, mechanisms, and realities of integrationist domination. Conversely, with the actor-centred (assimilationist, emplacement, and homemaking) approaches, it provides a typology of (non-)migranticized actors’ collective responses to integrationist domination. Following the observation that the notion of ‘integration’ is characterized by a certain degree of polysemy, the article examines how selected approaches implicitly relate to actors’ affirmation of, resistance against, or ignorance of the dominant institutional integration governance. This theoretic overview of actors’ everyday ordinary dealings with integrationist dominance allows us to complement the domination-critical understanding of the concept of ‘doing integration’, since the hegemonic quality exists only with its affirmation and becomes weak with actors’ resistance. The final section of the article offers an analytical synthesis by bringing together key implications from the domination-critical and actor-centred approaches to ‘integration’. Pointing to the complexities of integrationist domination ‘from above’, we sketch the ideal types of respective collective responses to integrationist claims ‘from below’ in terms of their collective co-doing, undoing and not doing.