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Refugees are often perceived as a homogeneous group and defined by their present conditions; the diversity of their social histories is thus overlooked. (Dis)Integrating Families explores the extent to which the backgrounds of Kurdish refugees from Syria shape their encounters with education in Sweden, as the key vehicle of state-led integration.

The thesis breaks with the mainstream perspective on integration by emphasising refugees as products of their social histories. Family interviews are used to analyse parents’ backgrounds based on their individual, family, and social background, including the Syrian context. The focus is on Kurdish refugee families arriving in Sweden from Syria after the war in 2011 as parents encounter the constraint to further educate themselves and their children. Kurds in diaspora work hard at keeping their past alive, despite lacking a Kurdish education system and the disruption of migration. This particular case provides sociological insight into how individuals’ social histories shape their response to constraints from ‘receiving societies,’ drawing on Abdelmalek Sayad’s holistic view of immigration as determined by emigration in critique of ‘State thought,’ and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.

This thesis helps understand how forced migration challenges parents’ former dispositions. While in some respects, class background determines their strategies in Sweden, in others, their social status as refugees blurs the differences related to class and reinforces their national identity, which they relate to their sociopolitical history of oppression and statelessness. Their present status thus challenges family dynamics in terms of generation and gender, thereby highlighting the constraints they face in Sweden. While acknowledging the weight of these constraints on parents, the thesis shows how their engagement with education is shaped by their social histories and how their Kurdish identity becomes a source of unity beyond class.

In contrast to the normative view that integration is the ultimate goal for refugees, this thesis reveals a constant process of negotiation between present and past social ties; between integration and (dis)integration. This suggests that integration in specific domains of social life in Sweden entails the (dis)integration from past identities previously internalised as ways of existing in the world. In summary, the dynamic between integration and (dis)integration can be seen as habitus clivé in the making.