The aim of this essay is to study how internationally adopted people of colours’ national identifications are created in interaction with other people outside of their closest social networks of people, and how this can affect their feelings of social belonging and exclusion. This is accomplished by examining qualitative ethnographic interviews through social constructivist theories and concepts such as Erving Goffman’s symbolic interactionism and theories behind national identifications. The essay explores how the internationally adopted participants are met by other people and how these social situations are constructed. The question “where are you from?” is central in this study. The essay studies how the participants identify themselves and how they express these self-identifications. Results show that the informants relate to a Swedish national identity one way or another and that they express this to others with the help of different symbols, behaviours and actions. The study material shows that the internationally adopted participants get stigmatised in Sweden both for being adopted and for being non-white, and thus risk getting feelings of exclusion from a Swedish national identity. Although there are some social interactions which make them feel connected to and included in certain communities of people which often include other adopted individuals or people of colour.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-451248 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Breding, Thi-Sofie |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för kulturantropologi och etnologi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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