Promoting the social inclusion of immigrants through local networks: insights from building a transdisciplinary network

In recent years, migration into Europe has become a highly salient issue for the policy makers who formulate immigration regulations and laws, the service providers and practitioners, who support the settlement of refugees, and the researchers who inform policy and practice. Many refugees come from countries in the Global South and face numerous challenges when adapting to life in Europe. 

PIISTON (Promoting Inclusion, access to Information and Successful Transition for refugees), a learning and action network aimed to facilitate ongoing research and development efforts by improving the mutual knowledge transfer between researchers and users (refugees, service providers, policy makers). It aimed to promote refugees’ inclusion, access to information and successful transition into Norwegian society by consolidating knowledge across disciplines, increasing collaboration, and strengthening service provision across sectors. The network consisted of researchers from health promotion, social work, child welfare, cross-cultural psychology, development studies, anthropology and geography, together with service providers from the public, civil society and private sectors, and refugees. PIISTON also included academics from Germany, Scotland, the Netherlands and Canada to help learn from other countries, and to build on synergies, share knowledge and learn from their experiences of working with refugee populations.

Speaker:
Dr Fungisai Gwanzura Ottemöller is an associate professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Development, Faculty of Psychology, University of Bergen, Norway. She has a multi-disciplinary background in psychology (Bsc.), health promotion (M.Phil.) and obtained her PhD in Human Geography at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She previously did research on mental health, HIV/AIDS (Zimbabwe) and childhood studies (Zimbabwe and Scotland). Her current research interests are immigrant children and young adults’ acculturation in Norway; young people and families’ experiences of the Norwegian child welfare system; young immigrants’ transitions into employment; social inclusion; the value of lived experience when working with immigrants; and maternal health. She is a qualitative researcher focusing on participatory action research. She applies strength-based approaches in her research and is interested in promoting intersectional, decolonial and decolonizing perspectives in migration research in Norwegian and European contexts.