Sarah-Louise Japhetson Mortensen

Social anthropologist focusing on asylum policies in Nordic welfare states.

I am a social anthropologist educated from Aarhus University. 

My research focuses on asylum policies in Nordic welfare states, how these affect refugees and their families’ everyday lives, as well as how refugees negotiate and manoeuvre within legal and bureaucratic constrains.

In my ph.d. dissertation, I explore how the “temporary turn” in Danish asylum policy impact Syrian refugees’ lives in Denmark, and the multiple ways in which Syrian refugees experience and respond to the increasing temporariness of protection. I also experiment with and develop podcasting as an ethnographic and collaborative method for knowledge creation and dissemination. My ph.d. project has been a part of the interdisciplinary research project TemPro. 

At CMI, I am a part of the interdisciplinary research project ATTACH. My focus is twofold. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Norway, I explore 1) how attachment requirements are interpreted and practiced by caseworkers and frontline employees, and 2) how refugees navigate attachment requirements, how these affect their choices of e.g. education, labour, and family establishments, as well as how attachment requirements relate to their own experiences of being attached to people, places, memories etc. … and then I plan to continue experimenting with podcasting as a medium for collaborative knowledge creation.