"Doing belonging": young former refugees and their active engagement with Norwegian local communities

This article explores the everyday lives of young former refugees in small Norwegian towns and considers how a focus on "doing belonging" can help us understand the processes of place attachment and social inclusion/exclusion in a time of increasing diversity and social division. By looking at these youths' everyday activities and social networks using a range of participatory methods, this article describes how former refugee youths actively work to create and maintain a sense of belonging. The study shows that the youths simultaneously draw on shared knowledge from their social networks and on embodied knowledge gained through the habitual use of place to perform belonging. It is argued that embodiment, as in being a particular type of body interacting with people and place, matters; other crucial aspects are freedom to move and experience the materiality of place, and that former refugees' belonging needs to be understood as relating to other people’s understandings of their right to belong. The study shows that particular structural conditions for doing belonging should be considered by policy makers.


Introduction
How children and young people create a sense of belonging and attachment to place has been studied in various geographical contexts (Cele 2006;Cuervo & Wyn 2017;Kuller & Farley 2019). Simultaneously, there has been interest in the concepts of 'placelessness', and 'displacement' in a more 'fragmented world' (Casey 1993), particularly as concerns forced migration (Boyden & Hart 2007;Ní Laoire et al. 2010;Archambault 2011). The wellbeing of former refugee youths has been shown to be strongly influenced by their perceived sense of belonging and their experiences of inclusion in or exclusion from the local community (Correa-Velez et al. 2010;Chen & Schweitzer 2019).
Here, we focus on young former refugees' (aged 13-18 years) lived experiences of settling in a new home place and how they negotiate and perform belonging 2 . The paper draws on a qualitative fieldwork together with 40 youth growing up in Norwegian small towns, paying particular attention to those who have lived in Norway less than five years.
Studies of migrant youth have largely focused on metropolitan areas and multicultural neighbourhoods. Although there has been a growing interest in migration to rural areas in Scandinavia (Hedberg & do Carmo 2012;Stenbacka 2013;Søholt et al. 2018), the focus on migrant children and youths' experiences of belonging in rural areas has been sparse with some exceptions (Wernesjö 2015;Rye 2016). This lack of knowledge affects how former refugee youths are understood, which, in turn, has consequences for the political and social structures enabling them to participate in their local communities.
The paper examines how the participants create a sense of belonging to social and material aspects of place through their everyday practices. A specific focus on everyday life practices, on where and how youths actually spend their time, and on the shape and meaning of their social networks, reveals the constant and embodied work that the youths' put into creating and maintaining a sense of belonging, and what structural constraints they might face.
We realize that attention to children's places is necessarily multi-faceted (Gardner & Mand 2012), and explore belonging by focusing on how different aspects of place facilitate or hinder their sense of belonging. As expressed by Ottosson, Eastmond, and Cederborg (2016), former refugee youths are deeply involved in creating a place for themselves and in constructing a "normal life" through their everyday practices.
Viewing youths' place attachment and belonging as multifaceted entails focusing on both social and material aspects of belonging. The social dimension builds on an understanding of belonging as relational and created in negotiations with others. The social dimension is imbued with power, as there are those who claim belonging and those who have the power to grant belonging (Antonsich 2010). The materiality of the environment surrounding former refugee youths might also affect their attachment processes, both as a context for social interaction and in itself, for example, through experiences of nature as a therapeutic environment (Sampson & Gifford 2010).
We argue that understanding how former refugee youths "do" belonging can provide key information about what is important for them in the settlement process.

Youth, place attachment, and belonging
The concept belonging has many meanings depending on the purpose of its use. We understand belonging both as a personal, emotional attachment to people and places (Antonsich 2010;Yuval-Davis 2011), and as a social matter related to discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion (Yuval-Davis 2011). Likewise, belonging has been associated with feeling safe in that one feels accepted as part of the local community and shares its social networks and practices (Anthias 2008;Yuval-Davis 2011).
The doing of belonging that we refer to draws on the notion of performativity developed by Butler (1990) vis-à-vis the performativity of gender. Gender is described as the stylized repetition of acts of gender that create the idea of gender (Butler 1990, 140). Butler developed her theory as an argument against essentialist notions of identity, claiming that it is our actions and not our biological bodies that constitute gender. Just as gender can be performed, belonging -we believe -is something that can be detached from ideas of territorial rootedness, instead building on the performativity of place norms (Savage et al. 2005), which are continually changing and, following Butler, can be subverted. Connecting Butler's theory of performativity to belonging, Bell (1999) argued that belonging can be viewed as the everyday performance of ordinary practices and a replication of such performances. Hence, by doing ordinary activities like playground football or walking to and from school, place knowledge can be created that contributes to a sense of belonging.
Drawing on Massey's understanding of place as "constantly shifting articulations of social relations through time", including relations to other places, places can be described both as 'distinct places' and as porous and meaning different things to different people (Massey 1995, 188). However, knowing, repeating, and performing place norms call for time and negotiation.
As de Certau (1984) pointed out, belonging is a sense that stems from how everyday activities are performed over time. He means that people make sense of space through everyday practices and that repeating these practices can be a means to overcome alienation. Seamon (1980) understands place attachment as produced through people's habitual everyday movements, which he calls time-space routines, that, when they overlap, gives an impression of how place is performed in everyday life (Cresswell 2004, 35).
Research has shown that children's and youth's sense of belonging to place is gained through everyday place encounters that generate embodied knowledge (Cele 2006;Bourke 2017). During childhood, the social and material aspects of place are particularly integrated (Christensen 2003), embedded in physical and political ecologies (Gardner & Mand 2012, 970).
By performing and doing belonging through everyday practices, youth produce and reproduce place norms and are involved in place making (Cuervo & Wyn 2017).
For former refugee youth, being able to create meaningful social relations and being recognized and valued by the local community are crucial for a sense of belonging (Correa-Velez et al. 2010). The materiality of place has been identified as important for recreational purposes and for feelings of wellbeing and safety (Sampson & Gifford 2010). Chen and Schweitzer (2019), for example, found that belonging was closely tied to social bonds manifested through kinship and friendship, and to sharing positive experiences as well as norms and interests. Social bonds were often represented through physical space and materials. Studies have however shown that experiences of racial discrimination and exclusion from public space are frequently reported, contributing to a sense of non-belonging (Caxaj & Berman 2010;Correa-Velez et al. 2010).

Youth, place, and the political
Youths' everyday lives and the process of creating belonging is affected by various structural and mundane politics. Children's lives are highly institutionalized, and as Gardner and Mand (2012, 972-973) have pointed out, as youths physically move into different locations, such as school or afterschool activities, they are placed in different relationships relative to one another and to wider society. As the young former refugees expand their social worlds, their claims to belonging might become a question of negotiation in relation to intersectional subject positions such as, gender, ethnicity, race, and class (Yuval-Davis 2011). Youths life worlds, spatial patterns, and social spaces are interwoven with political discourses and behaviours through which they learn that there is a politics of injustice in society (Kallio & Häkli 2011;Cele & van der Burgt 2015). In a study of Somali refugees in Denmark, Valentine, Sporton and Nielsen (2009), found that the youths, did not feel that they belonged in Denmark even though they had adopted "Danish norms" in terms of language and clothing. Faced with a narrow definition of Danishness that was strongly connected to secularism and whiteness, the former refugee youths were constantly constructed as strangers, making it difficult for them to "find their place" in society.
Although youth have little official control over their placement, they are generally very active in participating in different forms and levels of compliance, resistance, and subversion (Gardner & Mand 2012, 972). In youth culture, protest as well as belonging is often communicated through various styles of clothing and music (Back 1996;Vestel 2004;Cele & van der Burgt 2015), which are consumed, also outside of metropolitan areas, through the global consumer market and social media. This notion is important, as Massey (1998) has claimed that all youth cultures, not only those of diaspora youths, are hybrids, because they involve active importation and adaptation. Still, it is not a neutral matter what cultural influences become predominant. How nations are positioned relative to one another regarding global dimensions of power affects the ascriptions and racialization of actors based on their country of origin (Anthias 2012, 103).

Migration to rural areas in Norway
Norway has experienced growing ethnic diversity through immigration since the 1960s. Today 14 % of the Norwegian population is of migrant background and 3 % of Norwegian citizens have migrant parents. Today, migrants are settled in all Norwegian municipalities, although most live in urban areas (IMDi 2018).
People of refugee background make up 4 % of the total Norwegian population and 30 % of the population of migrant background. The largest groups of refugees come from Somalia, Iraq, Eritrea, Syria, and Afghanistan (IMDi 2018).
Refugees with permission to stay are settled across the country based on collaboration between the central government and the municipalities. The dispersal policy corresponds with national district policy and is intended to contribute to preserve the regional settlement pattern (Søholt et al. 2018, 221).
The study was undertaken in four towns each with approximately 5,000-30,000 inhabitants. Three of these towns are situated in two counties in eastern Norway and one in northern Norway. Two of the counties are among those that settle the fewest refugees, according to the integration authorities (IMDi 2018). In Western Europe the rural is often represented as "withe space", and "ethnicity" as something possessed by others who are seen as "out of place" in the rural (Holloway 2006;Søholt et al. 2018). Although this representation is contested and rural areas are being re-shaped by multifaceted immigration (Hedberg & do Carmo 2012;Stenbacka 2013;Søholt et al. 2018), such discourses might influence the youths' experiences of belonging and render them vulnerable to racialization.
While the municipalities are obliged to provide adult refugees with a two-year introduction program, no active measures are taken by the government to help children become participating members of their local communities. This has lead researchers to claim that the national settlement plan for refugees is primarily adult centred (Archambault 2011).
Schools are described as the main arena for integration of children and youth. It is the municipalities who independently decide how to arrange the language training of recently arrived students. The schools in this study all handled this differently, depending on their size, resources, and number of minority students. The studied schools in eastern Norway reported having approximately 10-15 % minority language-speaking students. In the town of 5,000 inhabitants, only a handful of minority students were enrolled in the school. The school in northern Norway reported having approximately 20 % minority language-speaking students. Two of the schools offered introduction classes in their ordinary premises, while one school only provided individual lessons in basic Norwegian language. In one municipality, all newly settled students were placed in a centralized school together with adult migrants. They were later to start education in an ordinary school when they had reached a basic level of language proficiency.
Besides education, the national sports organization (Norges Idrettsforbund) is viewed as the main driver of youth integration, and participation in sports clubs and other after-school activities is described as central to building social capital and community participation (Kulturdepartementet 2012). Researchers have criticized this (Rafoss & Tangen 2017), noting the increasing class differences, costs, and demands for parental involvement in sports (Strandbu et al. 2017). Our research indicate that organized activities are indeed important for finding ways to connect these youths with other youths' and society. However, we argue that to understand former refugee youths' experiences of place attachment and belonging, it is necessary to gain knowledge of how they participate independently in their local environments also outside mainstream institutions. Likewise, it is important to listen to what the youths themselves say about these processes, and to recognize their efforts to belong, and not only what they have not yet achieved.

Methods
The study employs a qualitative approach using interviews, observations, auto-photography, and activity diaries. Punch (2012) has advocated using a multi-methods approach with former refugee children, as this makes it possible to take account of the different places of the children's everyday lives. Further benefits are that the participants are given various choices in how to express themselves, to overcome language barriers, and that ethical questions can be addressed more dynamically (Block et al. 2012). The youths and their parents were given written and oral information about the project, and the youths were given information about consent, voluntary participation, and confidentiality at several stages of the project. The names of the participants and towns have been changed to pseudonyms to ensure their confidentiality. The study has been approved by Uppsala University's ethics committee. 3 The material was collected during autumn 2012, spring 2014, and winter/spring 2015 by one author. 4 All except four participants were recruited through the five schools where participant observations were conducted. In total, 40 youths participated in the project (26 girls and 14 boys): 30 were interviewed, 30 completed activity diaries, and 10 contributed by taking photos. Most participants were between 13 and 16 years old, while two were 17 and 18 years old. The participants have backgrounds from 13 countries, but the majority were from Somalia, Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. The youths have in common that they all have a residency permit and are settled in a municipality together with their families.
The activity diaries provided a tool to map the participants' use of space, activities, and social networks. A strength of activity diaries is that they provide information about ordinary activities, such as watching a movie or hanging out, which are seldom asked about in other methods, and thus provides insights into where and how the participants actually spend their time (van der Burgt 2006).
We used the activity diaries of 26 participants, that is, 17 girls and 9 boys. We divided the participants into two groups: those who had lived in Norway for 0-2 years (17 participants) and those who had lived in Norway for 3-5 years (9 participants). The first two years is the settlement phase, when most participants are attending separate language training classes in school. The participants in the 3-5year category were attending ordinary classes and had established a life in Norway; at the same time, they often remembered the process of becoming acquainted with a new place. The participants were also grouped according to place of residence. These were coded according to respective counties, here called Nordby (nine participants), Fjellby (nine participants), and Vikby (eight participants). In Nordby, all the participants came from the same school and lived near one another. In Fjellby, the participants went to a centralized school exclusively for students of migrant background located in the outskirts of the town centre. In Vikby, they came either from a mid sized town where they went to a preparatory class, or from a small town where they attended a regular class. One participant came from the rural area outside the mid sized town.
The participants were given a booklet in A4 format and were asked to record what they did from the time they finished school until they fell asleep in the evenings. They also recorded where and with whom the activities took place. The diaries were completed over a one-week period. The booklet included a social network map in which the participants mapped their family relations, closest friends, friends from school and after-school activities, and friends from other places in their migration history. Talking about the social network maps with the participants facilitated analysis of the activity diaries. The participants were given time during school hours to fill in the diary. In total 879 activities were counted. The participants registered approximately 105 different types of activities grouped into 22 main categories. The frequency of activities registered varied from 6 to 67 during the studied week. How many activities the participants actually registered varied greatly depending both on the actual number of activities undertaken and on the participants' commitment to filling in the diary, but all diaries contained useful information. The diaries are presented in tables, however, they should not be read as a statistical measurement, but rather as a qualitative overview, that provides information about the youth's everyday lives. The descriptive presentation of the diaries will be "thickened" by the following analysis of interviews and observations. 30 interviews were conducted and all except 4 took place in the schools. One participant was interviewed in the local library and three were interviewed in their family homes. Most of the interviews were conducted individually in Norwegian, but in some cases, because of language issues and for comfort, participants were interviewed together. During the interviews, the participants were asked about their new homes and to describe the town, their school experience, what they liked to do with family and friends, how they felt about the town in relation to other places they had lived earlier, transnational contact with family and friends, and experiences of belonging and non-belonging.
Participant observation was carried out in the schools, during class and during recess, to understand how the youths interacted socially and used the school's spaces, and to understand aspects that were difficult to verbalize in interview. Informal conversations were held with students and teachers. In addition, observations were conducted in town centres, sometimes with students and teachers during school hours, but also after school, when the researcher met with participants. Walking was part of the observations: some walks were formally planned as walking interviews, but in the north, the researcher stayed in the same neighbourhood as some of the participants, and it became a routine to walk to and from school together. Lee and Ingold (2006, 68) argued that walking can provide an insight into people's social engagement between the self and the environment they experience while walking. In this case, the walks fostered understanding of the research participants' embodied relations to place, in terms of both the material, concrete use of place and abstract memories of other places (Cele 2006). Participants in the north also invited the researcher to handball practice and dance class. In addition, the researcher visited ten participants in their family homes and met with parents and siblings, who contributed valuable information about the settlement process, the local community, and transnational family life.
Ten youths participated by using auto-photography to present places where they spent a lot of time and/or places that meant something special to them. The photos also included images of people and material items. By using auto-photography, participants could document their daily lives without the presence of the researcher. The participants produced a total of 86 images. A photo elicitation interview was either part of the in-depth interview or was conducted independently, focusing only on the images. Photo elicitation interviews are particularly suitable for exploring everyday taken-forgranted things (Rose 2012) and visual methods are helpful in overcoming language barriers when working with newly arrived youths (Boyden & Ennew 1997).
The analysis was conducted in two steps: one was based on the individuals' self-narratives about the photos, and the other was a content analysis in which the photos were divided, based on their content, into four categories: everyday places, social relations, nature, and identity markers. This was done to gain a visual understanding of the youths' activities and movements, and of what places and relations were important to them during the settlement process.

Local embeddedness: mapping everyday routines
We will now focus more specifically on how belonging was created through place-based activities and social relations. As we will show, it was through how the mundane activities of everyday life were performed that belonging was created, through a process structured by time, gender, and socio-economic differences.

Home-based activities and family relations
The results from the activity diaries indicate that much of the youths' free time was spent at home (Bakken 2017;Nordbakke 2019). Table 1 shows the overview of the counted activities by gender and years spent in Norway, 5 and Table 2 shows the locations of the activities.
In general, the newly settled (0-2 years) youths spent more time at home in activities with their families while the youths in the 3-5-year category spent considerably more time hanging out or visiting friends. The youths in the 0-2-year category for example reported watching TV at home with family members twice as often as did the youths in the 3-5-year category. A lot of time was spent on homework, which the youths usually did at home with their siblings. The girls reported doing schoolwork twice as often as did the boys. The same goes for household chores, which the girls reported doing more than twice as often as did the boys.
The family was seen as the primary source of support and comfort during the settlement phase (see also Chen & Schweitzer 2019). Many, especially those who had come through family reunification, said that they had gotten to know the local environment through parents or siblings who had lived in the area longer. The youths in the 3-5-year category to a larger degree seemed to have adapted to local youth activities as they spent more time in activities outside the family realm. Also, the amount of housework decreased among the youths in this category. This can be seen as indicating that parental demands and restrictions might have eased over time (Friberg & Bjørnset 2019), but nevertheless after a relatively short time in Norway.
The studied youths followed a general pattern in socializing with friends via online games and social media (Bakken 2017), as 20 of 26 participants reported doing this. Almost all participants used social media to communicate with friends and family, not only in the Norwegian local communities, but also in their former home places (see Mathisen & Stenbacka 2015).  The youths usually met with friends outside the home, though nine youths reported spending time with friends either in their own or at their friends' homes. Why most preferred to meet elsewhere can be seen in relation to young people's wish to avoid parental control, but overcrowding also played a role. As articulated in interviews, it was easier to play out "youthfulness", that is, being loud and outgoing with friends, outside the home, and several said that there was nothing to do at home.

Organized activities and informal meeting places
From the activity diaries, we can see that 12 of 26 youths were engaged in organized activities, such as sports and cultural activities. 7 of 17 girls and 5 of 9 boys were engaged in such organized activities. While the girls were more varied in their activities, the boys all played football.
However, if we include unorganized outdoor activities and exercise, the picture changes. Then, 12 of 17 girls and 8 of 9 boys reported doing activities in their local environments. This could be taking walks in the neighbourhood or in the mountains with their families, and bicycling or jogging. In addition, five participants registered exercising at a local gym. Seven participants (three girls and four boys) reported playing unorganized football with their friends, in either playgrounds or outdoor football arenas. In the interviews, playgrounds and football fields were described as places where the youths could go to find others to hang out with in a more casual way. In contrast to organized activities, which are often structured along age and gender lines, unorganized playground football offered opportunities to meet youths of different ages and of both sexes. For some of the girls, joining an organized girls' team seemed like too much of a challenge, as the perceived level of skill served as a threshold for entry. At the playground, the point was just to hang out and play around without the element of competition.
Nevertheless, even participating in unorganized activities entailed challenges to be overcome, which can be illustrated by Sobia's photo, shown in Figure 1. Sobia attended a preparatory class and often played football in the field during school hours, but never during after-school hours when she mostly spent time at home with her family. She explained that this was what she had always been used to, underscoring the effort it takes to create new routines in a new place with differing norms and expectations of (gendered) youth behaviour. Sobia had taken the photo from the school window, illustrating both distance from and longing to enter the football field. Football fields were recurrent objects in the youths' photos, particularly those taken by the boys, and they would explain how much of their time they spent playing football, both organized and informally while hanging out with friends.
The Norwegian national survey Ungdata has identified a decrease in time spent hanging out because of youths' increasingly organized everyday routines (Bakken 2017). In this study, hanging out was found to be a frequent activity, as 20 of 26 participants reported hanging out at least once a week. In particular, the youths in the 3-5-year category would hang out outside stores, in the town centre, at bus stations, in the library, or outside McDonalds, while the youths in the 0-2-year category would hang out in the library or the town centre either alone or with friends of refugee background. That the youths reported hanging out frequently might be connected to socio-economic factors, as organized activities required capital that these youths often lacked.

School placement and place characteristics
We can see that the type and level of activity as well as the density of the participants' social networks depended on the time spent in Norway and on where they lived. For most, the network of friends consisted of youths of migrant background, although some also had majority Norwegians as friends. In the 0-2-year category however, 7 of 17 did not report doing any activities with friends.
In both Vikby and Fjellby, the towns had centralized preparatory schools for newly settled students, which meant that the students lived in different areas of the towns and the surrounding villages. In Fjellby, some of the newly settled students played football together in the evenings, but others said it was too far to take the bus to and from the town. In the town in Vikby, none of the youths in the 0-2year category reported participating in organized activities, undertaking any informal sports activities, or hanging out with friends in the evening. As has been reported in other studies of former refugee youths, making friends with majority youth is challenging when attending preparatory classes because of the physical separation and lack of natural meeting points (Wernesjö 2015). Particularly for those who lived outside of town, the travelling distance made it difficult to cultivate social ties in school that reinforced social networks where they lived. Although living and attending school in different places can increase one's overall knowledge of place and sense of belonging, here it seemed to weaken the possibilities to create ties in the local neighbourhood.
In Nordby the situation was different, as all of the participants in the 0-2-year category reported doing activities with friends. Even though the school in Nordby also had a preparatory class, there was only one junior high school and the participants lived within walking distance of the school and other facilities in town. Nordby has been settling a large number of refugees over the past decade, and local civil society is engaged in initiating social activities for families of refugee background. There were activities such as handball and hip-hop class that were free of charge and intended for girls. 6 These initiatives were successful, seeing that even girls who had been living in Nordby for only a few months were involved in the activities. This was also due to the fact that girls of refugee background who had lived in the town for a longer time period, functioned as social brokers for the newly settled and introduced them to these activities. However, the initiatives risked constructing divisions between minority and majority girls as well as between minority girls. The classes were advertised as for "immigrant girls", and some girls did not want to define themselves as such, even though they might have wanted to dance hip-hop.

"Doing belonging": narratives of place attachment
The analysis of the activity diaries illustrates how the participants were active in doing belonging and finding means of connecting themselves to place and its subjects and practices. How this was done varied between the participants, and their intersecting subject positions were important in relation to both place and time. In the following, we will discuss more specifically the youths' narratives regarding the social and material aspects of place attachment.

The social aspects of place attachment
The youths described their neighbourhoods as safe and calm. For many, living in these towns was their first experience of being in a safe place. During the settlement process, a sense of safety was connected to learning the language, finding friends, and finding one's way in the local area.
For Rhoda and Fana, two sisters from Ethiopia who had lived in Norway for six months, moving from the big city of Addis Ababa to a small village in Norway had meant a sense of freedom, as their family was threatened in Ethiopia because of their father's political activities. Fana described her exhilarating experience of freedom to move around and to express herself without fear: "When I lived in a big city, I couldn't go out, I couldn't speak my language or say my real name.
[Here] it is so nice. If I want to run I run, if I want to speak I speak … it's just wonderful".
The experience of being in a safe place enables the youths to start planning for a future and establish everyday routines (see Sampson & Gifford 2010). Now, both sisters are eager to learn new activities such as football and basketball, and are currently learning how to ride bikes. However, as they attend a preparatory school in another town, they do not know any youths in their village and it is difficult to meet friends from class. While many girls had experiences similar to that of Rhoda and Fana regarding their newfound ability to move around freely on their own, the boys instead described a lack of opportunities to hang out on the street with friends as they used to do. The brothers Feysal and Geedi, who had come from Kenya nine months earlier, explained that the difference between Nairobi and their new hometown was palpable. They found the small town quiet and homogeneous compared with Nairobi. In Kenya, they used to spend their after-school hours outdoors hanging out with friends and playing football whenever they wanted, while in Norway "we just go to school, stay at home, and go to football practice". The organized and institutionalized life young people lead in Norway was a change for them, and even though they attended ordinary school and played football on the local team, it was challenging to make friends. As there were few former refugee youths in the town, no structural support was provided. Geedi and Feysal have been left to themselves to negotiate their belonging according to the dominant group's language, culture, and values (Yuval-Davis 2011). As Lidén (2016) has highlighted, even though policy emphasizes football as an arena for integration, there is no automatic transfer of the sense of belonging one can feel on the football field to other arenas outside the field.
Sports can be seen as exemplifying a cultural activity with global-local interconnections (Massey 1991) that make doing belonging possible without a rootedness to place. Simon, who had lived in Norway for two years, described playing football just as he did in Addis Ababa: "I don't do things differently here than in Addis. … After school I have football practice almost every day. I practice five or six days a week". The difference, he pointed out, is that in Norway activities are often expensive: "Norway is … when you want to go for a swim, right, in Addis Ababa there are places for swimming, right, but here you have to pay -it's expensive you know. We cannot pay money, because we don't have any".
As Cele and van der Burgt (2015) have discussed, children and youth are aware of social and economic differences in society, and Sennett (2012) pointed out how such socio-economic differences are quickly absorbed into children's sense of self. Even if the youths can recognize local youth norms, it can be questioned whether they have the economic ability to adapt to them.
What we can see is that making connections demands more than simply finding arenas in which to meet other youths. Even when the participants did so, they could find it challenging to make meaningful social connections. Yasmeen, for example, who had lived in Norway for about four years, invested a lot of time in becoming involved in local social life. She regularly visited the youth centre where she studied guitar and took photography lessons without charge. In addition, she joined a badminton club where she played twice a week. However, although Yasmeen was actively engaged in many activities in a broad range of areas, she still spoke of missing close friends. In the area where she lived, there were few other youths of migrant background and she had trouble getting to know non-migrant youths in her school, relating this to experiences of racialization and exclusion.
What is important to underscore is that attaching oneself to a place is an interactive process that requires recognition by others, who will react by extending an invitation to connect. Being recognized by others and recognizing oneself in others not only generates a sense of belonging Tina Mathisen & Sofia Cele (Ahmed 2000), but has even been described as a prerequisite for the social integration of former refugee youth (Eide 2005, 152).
Feven, who had lived in Norway for three years, was not engaged in any organized activities; however, her activity diary was filled with activities with friends in the local community, illustrating her active engagement. Her school had about 15 % students of migrant background and Feven had a close group of friends with a mix of migrant backgrounds. Together they would hang out at the football stadium, go to McDonalds, hang out at the town mall, and go to the gym to exercise. In the evening, she would chat via social media. Being athletic and going to the gym was described as particularly important among the girls at Feven's school, as was the style of clothing, through which identity and group belonging are expressed. Being able to perform belonging demanded investment in youth norms such as being involved in the "right" activities and following fashion trends. Belonging could thus be created through the reproduction of behaviour and bodily representations (Butler 1990). The girls distanced themselves from the "cool kids" who were into brands, but still followed the popular styles of clothing, such as tight jeans, hoodies, long knitted jackets, and Converse shoes. As discussed by Rysst (2017, 190), acting and dressing according to majority norms is a pragmatic strategy for performing belonging when one is in a minority and the majority values dominate. Some of the girls combined this style with wearing a hijab and long skirts in a hybrid clothing practice through which different styles were mixed and matched, though with the mainstream style as the ideal (Massey 1998), thereby distancing themselves from the parental generation by reinventing how to wear "traditional" clothing. In the case of Feven and her friends, having a mix of backgrounds and experiences with different cultures made the group a safe space to sport one's own style, navigating the gendered clothing norms of both their parents and their peers.
Accordingly, what one wears can signal whether one is newly arrived or has lived in an area long enough to know the social norms and has the means to follow current trends. Several participants described how they were met with more openness and a sense that "we can relate to one another" after adapting to mainstream clothing styles. As articulated by Sennett (2012, 8), shared consumption patterns express a neutral, exploratory view of the world, reducing the anxieties that differences can inspire. Social minoritization and economic marginalization serve to hinder such confirmation.
We can see that the youths strove continuously to create belonging and ties of attachment, and that it was necessary for other youths to facilitate this process. Making connections with other youth of migrant background was clearly a key to finding belonging in this case. This has also been identified in earlier research into former refugee children and youth in Norway (Archambault 2011;Brekke 2015). In many cases, adults, such as teachers, helped the newly settled to find after-school activities. However, the findings suggest that when other youths functioned as social brokers, the migrant youths learned social codes faster and more easily found their place.

The material aspect of place attachment
Although social concerns largely occupy the youths' narratives, materiality is also important, constituting the framework and backdrop for everyday life. The mundane routines of getting to and from various locations and activities are important ways in which belonging is created. The repetition of time-space routines is crucial for creating meaning and a sense of safety in people's existence (Seamon 1980). Walking to school, libraries, and sporting activities permits one to learn and identify with various places and subjects. Everyday observations and actions provide knowledge of the local, while repetition and routine create connections and familiarity (de Certeau 1984). This was apparent when walking with the youths in the local environment. For example, when walking with some of the girls to school, the girls guided the researcher across previously trodden shortcuts, reminding her to watch her step at the same time as talking about homework with one another. Farther down the road, they pointed out where the small cinema and the sports hall were located, and said that there had been a football tournament there at the weekend. Particularly when walking to and from school, it was common for the students to describe how and where things happened, and who and what were located where. These reflections might seem trivial, but it is their triviality that reveal the girls' intimate knowledge of the place. Walking routines provided the youths with their own subjective experiences of place, which in turn connected them to place in various ways. Leaning on a psychoanalytical understanding, identification with place can be perceived as a process of "mirroring" in which one gradually comes to recognize oneself in the environment. The habitual repetition of certain acts in a place can serve to make people recognize themselves in objects that have become familiar to them, consolidating the process of identification with place (Leach 2002, 290).
Gradually getting to know an environment, then, is connected to material aspects of place such as finding one's way and knowing where one is. Yasmeen described how when she first arrived where she now lives, her father took her on walks through the neighbourhood and countryside, so that she would become familiar with the area. As he showed her his favourite places, they also became her favourite places. She described how she enjoyed "the beautiful nature", and how these walks provided her with "good memories" of her first period in Norway. As she had been separated from her father for a long time, the walks they took together became loaded with positive meaning that was transferred to the places visited. The physical environment became transformed from locations into lived places, as they were experienced with emotion. Yasmeen also mentioned that her interest in photography made her sensitive to the beauty of nature and to where she could find good spots to take pictures, such as "places perfect for photographing beautiful sunsets". In Yasmeen's narrative, and in others, we see examples of aesthetic-affective openness to the environment (Rautio 2015). The youths spoke of this in various ways, and the increasingly independent mobility they experienced since coming to Norway, noted particularly by the girls, was connected to this openness, as freedom facilitates contemplation. Greenness, for example, of trees, is mentioned and connected to positive feelings of safety, beauty, and freedom: It's like when you are out on your bike and listening to music … and you look around and everything is like a fantasy … There is no one on the street … there's only trees with leaves that are falling down … and little bit of wind … it's like a fantasy … very pretty.
Yasmeen described her experience of freedom and being able to move around on her own, and how this feeling merges with her green and pretty surroundings. Other studies have likewise found that former refugee youth connect the aesthetics of place to calmness and a healthy, supportive environment, which they see as a key quality supporting their sense of belonging (Sampson & Gifford 2010). It has also been found that the ability to notice beauty is an important sign of a restored sense of normalcy in everyday life (Keyes & Kane 2004).   (2020) Nila, who was living in northern Norway, connected gradually getting to know her new home with both the environment and social relations: Nila: [I started to feel at home] about two years ago. It was because I had lived here for a long time, about three years. And I had become familiar with the town. And suddenly I started to like the nature here.
Tina: What was it that made you like the nature?
Nila: I don't know, I just thought it was beautiful here. And then … then I got friends, so I wanted to live here and not move anywhere else. I have fun here.
Nila connected becoming familiar with the town to suddenly seeing the area's nature as beautiful, relating this to finding friends at around the same time. Earlier in the interview, Nila had described how she and her two best friends have a Friday ritual in which they, after school, go into town to buy food and then go to one of their homes to make dinner and watch a movie. Such a ritual can be described as a performance of friendship and belonging in which the spaces where such friendship rituals are enacted become places of belonging. In addition to mundane everyday habits, such rituals help create positive memories that imbue the environment with meaning, allowing a process of "mirroring" to take place, in which one comes to recognize oneself in one's environment (Leach 2002).

Experiences of racialization
As we have shown so far, the social and material aspects of place are brought together through the everyday habits and routines of the participants, something that allows for a recognition of the self in both the surrounding environment and in other people.
However, place is imbued with competing discourses and how the individual sees herself and is perceived by others to fit within these discourses is central for processes of belonging. Intersecting power relations form social space (Molina 2007), and social imaginations shape how bodies can be in the world (Ahmed 2006(Ahmed , 2010. Ahmed writes that some spaces extend certain bodies and do not leave room for others. If orientation is about making the strange familiar through the extension of certain bodies into space, then disorientation occurs when that extension fails (Ahmed 2006, 11).
During a group interview the participants compared experiences of encounters on the street, particularly with elderly people who would stare at them, refuse to smile back or refuse to engage in conversation. James told a story that clearly had stuck with him: It was me and a friend, we were working on our Junior Enterprise project for school. We were going to ask people to sponsor us. My friend went ahead of me and was talking to an old man, who took out his wallet and was going to give my friend some money, but when he saw me coming, he put his money back … The other participants responded to this story by laughing and commenting that James had a bad sense of timing, confirming that they recognized the experience. What this illustrates is how being visibly different is equated with not belonging to that place. The local man's active gesture of discomfort and hostility is a clear example of a social encounter where race is made active in the construction of difference. The place James normally feels belonging to, is turned into an exclusionary space where one could say that the process of "mirroring" gets stopped, and James is prohibited from recognizing himself as one who belongs.
The participants narrated such experiences of everyday racism and also connected their experiences to larger societal discourses about belonging and race. Thus, during our group discussion the participants were asked how they perceived the way immigrants were portrayed in the media. On this question, one of the participants immediately responded by connecting this to the terror attack on the 22 of July 2011, saying that at the time he had been hoping that the perpetrator would not be an immigrant. The other participants agreed explaining that if that would have been the case, it could have lead majority Norwegians to think of all immigrants as potential terrorists and that they all would have been frowned upon. James: We saw that when ... that guy, Bering Breivik, did what he did. The first thing they thought was that they were terrorists. Throughout this conversation James and Alexandra shift between being apprehensive about the terrorist being a foreigner and how this would affect the everyday encounters they would face, with performing the role of "the foreigner" "who does not care" about what "the Norwegians" think of them. The conversation reveals how discourses of race and belonging are intertwined and how the participants safeguard against and negotiate these discourses in their everyday lives. Belonging is not something that can be taken for granted. Rather, an individual's inner feeling of belonging can at all times be questioned by societal discourses or social encounters through which race becomes the reason as to why you do not belong.

Conclusions
Our research illustrates how young former refugees work actively to connect to their local communities in various ways through performing everyday activities, and relating to and creating place norms. It is mainly through everyday routines that they make sense of space and overcome alienation, as de Certeau (1984) suggested, and the mundane practices of everyday life contribute to shaping how belonging is created and negotiated. This process is simultaneously habitual as in participating in various local practices (e.g., adopting routines and activities popular in the local context), and reflexive, in that actively relating to a new place and the social practices played out there is an active choice.
As has been illustrated, intersecting subject positions such as gender, and socio-economic disadvantages can serve to hinder participation, depending on contextual variations such as time spent in Norway and place of residence. The small scale of the towns did not seem to be a hindrance to creating belonging; on the contrary, the closeness to nature and calmness experienced there contributed to a sense of safety and freedom to move around and explore the local surroundings. What seemed important was the presence of other youth of migrant background, both for finding friends and learning social norms, and for what kind of structural support the youths were provided with, both in school and in after-school activities.
"Doing belonging" was continuous work that the youth performed, doing so on several levels at once in relation to the material and social aspects of place. These aspects are entangled at various scales and through multiple practices in everyday life. The particular ways in which the material and social come together in feelings of place attachment are central to understanding how former refugee youth form bonds of belonging to place.
Place attachment is an interactive process, and a basic criterion for achieving it is that one is able to interact. Regarding the material aspects of belonging, the youths need physical access to places to be able to find their way around their neighbourhoods. Regarding the social aspects, the youths need to be given access to social spheres where other youths can confirm them as well as introduce them to the mundane practices and codes central to understanding and performing place. Such an introduction, followed by interpreting and performing the socio-spatial routines of a place, is crucial to how the youths do belonging.
Drawing on these insights, we can conclude that structural constraints affect how belonging is created. These constraints can be where the youths live, what type of school they attend and where, as well as whether they can access various social spheres, such as after-school activities and informal social gatherings. Where the youths spend time and the shape and meaning of their social networks reveal the character of these constraints, and these need to be considered politically as they greatly affect how former refugee youths' lives are organized.
As Ahmed (2000) has pointed out, the youths' experiences reflect the fact that a migrant body is a body that can feel out of place. It is necessary for others to recognize the youths as being in place, as belonging to where they are, for a genuine sense of belonging to grow. As was illustrated, the youth's possibilities to "mirror" themselves in their surroundings could suddenly be "stopped" due to encounters with race. The youth's strategy to counter this was through performing the role of "the foreigner". Following Butler (1990) one could say that the identity category "foreigner" was then constructed through the youths "doing" of already established discourses of what it means to be a "foreigner", hence disciplining them into specific subject positions.
Attachment to a place does not necessarily entail close-knit networks with the majority population; rather, the experiences of the studied youths show that a sense of belonging to the local community can be created through mundane everyday practices within the social and material frameworks and delimitations of being a young former refugee in a small town. In this process, we maintain that embodiment, as in being a particular type of body who interacts with people and places, is of particular importance, as is freedom to move and experience the materiality of place. It is a central understanding that belonging is not simply the work of people who seek belonging; rather, it is equally dependent on other people's understandings of their bodies and their right to belong.

Notes
1 An earlier version of this article has been published in Mathisen (2020). 2 The study uses a broad definition of the refugee status including quota refugees, people being granted refugee status for humanitarian reasons and family reunification with a person who has been granted status as refugee. Internationally the term re-settlement is commonly used, particularly when describing the situation for quota refugees who are chosen to be brought from a refugee camp and settled in a new country. Here, we use the term 'settlement phase' to highlight the time when refugees or other migrants are trying to adjust to a new situation and create new connections to people and place, without focusing on the youth's particular status.
3 Regionala Etikprövningsnämden Uppsala. 4 The fieldwork was conducted by Tina Mathisen as part of her PhD research. 5 It is important to note that it is the frequency of the activities that is being counted, not the time spent on each activity. 6 These services were provided by a company and based on the idea of social entrepreneurship, catering to municipalities and providing activities for social groups such as elders, disabled, and refugees. The initiative was based on the assumption that female refugees are not physically active and have few opportunities to participate in activities outside the home. 7 Before it was announced that the terrorist was a white Christian Norwegian, a researcher on terrorism suggested that Islamic terrorists were behind the 22 July 2011 attacks in Oslo and Utøya. Many Muslims in Oslo reported having been verbally and physically abused on the streets during the first few days after the attack (Andersson 2012).