From integration to reorientation: Processes of orientation after refugee resettlement in Denmark

This article builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2022-2024 with families from DR Congo, who have been resettled in Denmark since 2021 through the UNHCR-program. It draws on Sara Ahmed’s concept of “orientation” – including disorientation and reorientation – to develop a new approach to conceptualizing and understanding newly arrived refugees’ experiences with their new surroundings. In contrast to the deeply problematic concept of integration , we argue that the concept of orientation can illuminate power asymmetries and direct attention to how resettlement involves losing a sense of control with one’s body, physical environment, time and space – but also how a new sense of direction and familiarity is gradually reestablished through families’ own work of inhabitance. The concept of orientation thus paves the way for reorienting our analytical gaze towards the embodied, experiential, and messy dimensions of resettlement processes.