Understanding young people’s well-being within a translocal everyday life: How health and well-being are experienced and conditioned in the daily school life of young people recently migrated to Sweden

Understanding young people’s well-being within a translocal everyday life: How health and well-being are experienced and conditioned in the daily school life of young people recently migrated to Sweden

This dissertation deals with the relationship between young people’s health, everyday life, school, and migration. It is a compilation dissertation based on a comprehensive summary (kappa) and four empirical articles. With the school as a point of departure, the dissertation’s overarching aim is to explore everyday experiences of and conditions for health and well-being among young people who recently migrated to Sweden. Further, the aim is to illuminate and problematize the conditions and circumstances within which health is created and negotiated for this group of youths. The newly arrived youths’ experiences and conditions for health and well-being are analyzed through an overall social and cultural framework that emphasizes everyday life and micro-processes. At the same time, everyday experiences, social positionings, and material conditions, explored in the various studies, are linked to power processes. The individual’s room for agency in daily life depends on historical, structural, and relational conditions. In other words, health is related to power in various ways, which forms an extensive part of the dissertation’s analytical focus. The findings are based on three independent data collections, all with a qualitative, exploratory, and health-promoting approach. The study participants are males and females (16–20 years old) from Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Burundi, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Palestine, Kosovo, and Greece. The overall findings show how the young people’s health and well-being are created and conditioned in relation to their relationally, spatially, and temporally situated life experiences, concerning their negotiations of migrant positions, and through their possibilities to matter in regard to the material conditions of the everyday life. By an overall social and cultural approach, emphasizing a translocal everyday life when exploring the conditions of health and well-being for young people recently arrived in Sweden, this dissertation contributes to an under-researched field at the intersection of young people’s everyday life, school, migration, and health.