Introduction

This fieldnote reveals a picture of newly arrived children that we typically do not encounter in the literature. They are not treated as non-persons (Goffman 1974, p. 135) behind the mask of the refugee or the “import,” thus confirming the core group’s unquestioned belonging (Lund and Voyer 2019). Instead, they are part of the school “performance,” both frontstage and backstage. They are not seen as lacking resources (Bunar 2015; Evans et al. 2020), but as persons with capacities and valuable knowledge. They are interacting with their peers and are included in the performance of friendship in the classroom and during breaks. Newly arrived migrant students (NAMS), as seen in the example, are incorporated into the everyday life of school. This is not always the case in every school. And it does not resonate with what is depicted in state-of-the-art research. The research questions in the present article are not so much meant to explain a different, and more inclusive, pattern of peer interaction, but more to create a deeper understanding of peer interaction from the perspective of NAMS. We ask: What is the meaning of peer interaction within a superdiverse educational context?

The following sections explore the literature on the interconnectedness of peer interaction and NAMS and present the conceptual and methodological approach used in the present study, before arriving at our findings. The article concludes by arguing that the feeling of being ordinary is the meaning of peer interaction from the perspective of NAMS.

Exclusionary practices as a dominant theme

Research on immigrant youth has often treated them as a collective and shown how symbolic and social boundaries between young immigrants (as an out group) and the white ethnic majority population (as the core group) are constructed (see, e.g., Devine et al. 2008; Devine 2009; Lund 2020; Warikoo 2011). The novelty of the present article is that it focuses on NAMS who are studying at superdiverse schools and, specifically, on how peer interaction is realized and made sense of in such contexts.

In the research focusing on newly arrived children, migration and integration studies have looked at schooling, the asylum process, later settling and mental health (Delmi 2018). Research in the educational sciences has shown how newly arrived children become outsiders often when school and housing segregation reinforce each other, particularly in urban environments (Sharif 2017). Internal segregation arises within the schools. There are examples of newly arrived children being placed in separate classes, in a basement, or in modular classrooms, without the spatial and social prerequisites that allow longed-for peer interaction with students born in the country or with longer-term residents (ibid.).

Being “othered” by children and youth born in the country of immigration or by those who are longer-term residents is a pattern found in different national contexts, for example in the Nordic countries (Nilsson Folke 2017; Pastoor 2017; Svensson and Eastmond 2013; Wærdahl 2016; Wernesjö 2014), in Southern Europe (Azzolino et al. 2019), the United States (Evans et al. 2020; Dávila 2013), the United Kingdom (Pinson et al. 2010; Evans et al. 2020) and Australia (Riggs and Due 2010). As a consequence, newly arrived children spend time with other newly arrived children from the same country of origin (Wernesjö 2014). Such friendships are often established in separate classes (where they are separated from other children in the school). When NAMS enter a “mainstream” class with children not new to the country, one common experience they have is social exclusion (Nilsson Folke 2017; Juvonen 2015; Svensson 2017).

Exceptions exist but here the interaction is closely connected to assimilation. The assimilation process is associated with “blending in” with and being “similar” to the other children at school (Wærdahl 2016, p. 99), including having similar material things such as clothes. The culture of the country of emigration is expected to be left behind or downplayed (Devine 2009; Romme Larsen 2013).

To sum up, in the research on newly arrived children’s encounter with the school, there is a common theme: exclusion. They are not seen as having the “right” cultural capital and hence not viewed as bringing resources to the school; longer-term residents and children and youth born to white ethnic Swedish parents are depicted as avoiding them during breaks and lessons.

At the same time, we know that there are social advantages associated with multicultural interactions (Rutland et al. 2012), and segregating NAMS from peers born in the country or longer-term residents is detrimental to integration processes (Lund and Lund 2016; Sinkkonen and Kyttala 2014). But this does not mean that specific programs for intercultural encounters between children and youth with an immigrant background are successful. Research has shown that organic and routine-based encounters between youth are more socially productive for friendship-making than specific programs meant to create social relations between strangers (Harris 2016).

Research has also shown that improvement of language skills is not only important to educational achievement, but also to peer interaction. Language mastery and friendship enhance the feeling of being part of the new country and, in turn, a sense of belonging emerges among newly arrived children, irrespective of age (Batsleer et al. 2018; Devine et al. 2008; Svensson and Eastmond 2013).

Previous research on young migrant students in Sweden, as well as in an international context, has shown that social relations with students born in the country or who are longer-term residents are of great importance to NAMS’ school achievement. In addition to the fact that such social relationships promote a sense of belonging (Stretmo and Melander 2013), having a shared social space also strengthens learning processes. Studies have demonstrated that newly arrived students who actively collaborate with students born in the country or with students who are longer-term residents tend to have better opportunities to learn mathematics (Takeuchi 2016) and the majority language (Rodriguez-Izquierdo and Darmody 2019). It is also necessary to create opportunities for collaboration between these two student categories, as NAMS may find it difficult to create relationships with peers due to language barriers (Fridlund 2011) or their stigmatized position in society (Bunar and Sernhede 2013; Sharif 2017).Footnote 1

Attending school is both a knowledge project and a relational project (Lundström 2020). These two projects are important and connected.

Friendship is often seen as a measure of integration. This is probably based on the ideal according to which equity is a characteristic of friendship. But the seemingly paradoxical result of the norm of equality between friends can lead to a vertical friendship order, where friendship-making is done with students presumed to have the same social status (Lundström 2020). Horizontal friendship bonds are thus grounded in a vertical structure and this may explain why the research on recently arrived children has shown that they are not being incorporated into new or existing friendship constellations. They are not seen as equal, but instead sometimes even referred to as being “fresh off the boat” or “imports” (Lund and Voyer 2019).

Yet this is not a universal truth. As we saw in the introductory fieldnote from a school in Stockholm, there are also other stories to tell—stories of everyday solidarity and a valorization of superdiversity. The notion that a stranger can be one’s equal and one’s friend is a cultural narrative that can be realized (Kaplan 2018), depending on the context—the history of the space and its people.

Perspectives on diversity and the macro-micro link

We agree with Jeffrey C. Alexander when he states that a multidimensional theory requires consideration of:

how individual action and its social environments can be interrelated without reduction; how ideal and material dimensions can be brought into play without sacrificing their autonomy and reducing one to the other; how macro can be linked to micro without committing the fallacy of assuming the fit between them is entirely neat. (Alexander 1995, pp. 193–194)

Meaning is threaded through different analytical dimensions, performed in practice and differs across contexts. Interpretive puzzles are not one-dimensional and often demand theoretical development or combining different theoretical perspectives in order to understand their meaning. The latter has become necessary for us. We utilize four perspectives in an effort to illuminate the meaning of peer interaction in a superdiverse educational context as well as its macro-micro links.

The first perspective elucidates the importance of the civil sphere as an activating cultural structure of meaning and emotion. In the words of Alexander, “societies are not governed by power alone and are not fueled only by the pursuit of self-interest. Feelings for others matter, and they are structured by the boundaries of solidarity” (2006, p. 3). This concept of civil society, which relies on social solidarity and inclusion of others, irrespective of who they are, stands in strong contrast to a myth of primordialism. Who are considered the “right” individuals or groups to inhabit a place constructs the notion of “us” and “them,” thus unfolding a social drama. In research on the civil sphere and migration, it is not uncommon for the social drama to include ingredients of temporal “myths” (2006; Lund and Voyer 2019). When newcomers arrive to a country such as Sweden, often after escaping war, poverty, climate change and oppression or coming for work or as a relative, three ideal-typical modes of incorporation may be actualized.

The first mode of incorporation—assimilation—involves the inclusion of individuals who must abandon any evidence of their membership in subordinated groups if they are to become part of public life. On the other hand, “hyphenated incorporation” expands the boundaries of the civil sphere to include subordinated categories, but still maintains a view that these included categories remain distinct and subordinate, while making unique contributions to society as a whole. And finally, the “multicultural” mode of incorporation recognizes differences as equal “variations of the sacred qualities of civility” (Alexander 2006, p. 452).

In the present article, multicultural incorporation is of particular interest because it promotes “unity of difference”—an approach that has proven to be a powerful vehicle of social cohesion, where we respect and recognize each other as a matter of principle and in our shared experience of being human (Alexander 2006). Our theoretical sight is set on lived multicultural incorporation within school communities. Education can have a significant civil quality (Dávila 2021; Lund 2013, 2015; Lund and Lund 2016; Lund 2020; Honneth 2015; Tognato 2018). Hence, education is not only a matter of accumulating resources, but also gives us clues as to how modes of incorporation play out against the backdrop of the drama of the civil sphere.

In order to see how a drama can unfold, we need to understand the local scenes in which it is performed. In the present article, the context is two multiethnic schools located in two different settings. One context can be characterized as a “plural-minorities school” and the other as a “minority–majority school” (in the methods section we describe the schools in more detail). Stockholm is a superdiverse city, but there are different configurations of superdiversity influencing individual action. Superdiversity (Vertovec 2007, 2012, 2019) is a concept that considers this complexity of migration-related differences and thus grounds our second perspective.

Superdiversity explains “new social patterns, forms and identities that arise from migration-driven diversification” (Vertovec 2019, p. 125), and points to how “several dimensions of migration flows have been changing at once” (Meissner and Vertovec 2015, p. 545).

Sweden has experienced multiple waves of migration over recent decades, with the most change being visible in urban areas. Raw numbers have fluctuated, but there has also been rich variation in migrants’ country of origin, ethnicity, religion, language, educational background, and reasons for migration. There are also similarities and differences among and between first- and second-generation migrants and among holders of varied migration statuses.

Such changes create new encounters and learning processes within institutions and between individuals and groups, but also new status hierarchies, boundary work and inequalities (Vertovec 2019). There is also a potential for the sensitivity to diversity to become a new norm, concerning “the ways people perceive others” (Vertovec 2012, p. 306). This shapes an individual’s way of thinking in “more complex terms,” for example concerning linguistic differences, religious practices, traditions and lifestyles, forming “contingent openness to people, corporations and societies” (Vertovec 2012, p. 307). The possibility of changing one’s perspective and being empathic is central to this process.

To change our focus from ethnic categories and the “figure of the immigrant” to interaction in day-to-day practices, Gilroy suggests the term conviviality, which grounds our third perspective. According to Gilroy, ethnic categories and fascination with “the immigrant” tend to mask the fact that racism rather than migration is the “solitary unifying idea” (p. 165) of Europe’s colonial past and “preceded the appearance of migrants inside the European citadel” (pp. 165–166). Such awareness can provide explanations other than the ones in which immigrants are seen as “the authors of their own misfortune” (p. 166). Thus, conviviality carries an awareness of relations of dominance and their historical roots, but with a focus on relations, status hierarchies and boundary work can be acknowledged without determining in advance the outcome of migration-related differences and relations. Conviviality points to “processes of cohabitation and interaction” and the “ability to live with alterity without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent” (Gilroy 2004, p. xi).

Superdiversity challenges the notion of ethnicity (Meissner and Vertovec 2015; Padilla and Olmos-Alcaraz 2019) and conviviality the focus on any fixed identity (Gilroy 2004, xi). Social interaction instead becomes the entry point for our analysis, where an awareness of modes of incorporation and an eye for conviviality in superdiverse settings “contest the reproduction of otherness” (Padilla et al. 2015, p. 632). Migration-related differences do not always mean a boundary between “us” and “them” (cf. Padilla et al. 2015). Openness and solidarity are also part of the drama of social life (Alexander 2006).

To connect the macro-level of ideals with the micro-level of conviviality, we bring in a fourth perspective that does what Bourdieu describes habitus as doing, i.e., creating a kind of “harmony between practices and ideas” (1995, p. 70). This is a harmony that the actor experiences as self-evident: “He feels at home in the world because the world is also in him, in the form of habitus” (Bourdieu 2000, p. 143).

Relations also form habitus on an institutional level. Institutions have memories of the individuals, groups and ideas that have inhabited these social scenes. Habitus “ensures the active presence of past experiences” (Bourdieu 1990, p. 54). This creates tacit expectations, such that as soon as an individual enters a social scene, there are implicit rules to follow and taken-for-granted ideals to adhere to and hence, “more history” is made. We will talk about an institutional habitus (see also Reay et al. 2005) to emphasize the fact that modes of incorporation are institutionally enforced and thus part of the observed school community’s everyday life, and not detached ideals. In the present article, as a result of our empirical findings, we concentrate on the institutional habitus of multicultural incorporation. It is viewed as having the potential to help us see difference as a part of humanity within specific organizations, such as schools.

The combination of the work of Alexander and Bourdieu could be seen as contradictory. We are aware of the critique of Bourdieu’s work made by Alexander (1995) and the strong program in cultural sociology (Alexander and Smith 2004). There are many truths in this critique. Bourdieu’s theories can easily become deterministic, pointing to processes of reproduction rather than potential for social change and favoring that idea that social life is a bid for power rather than a sphere of solidarity and civil repair as well. Still, there are also benefits associated with the concept of habitus, as it brings to the fore historical and contextual conditioning processes. Moreover, ties can be made between the concept of habitus and different theories of society that consider the potential of individuals, groups and institutions, as well as macro-narratives and micro-interactions, to create boundaries of inclusion/exclusion (i.e., Alexander’s and Gilroy’s theorizations). From our perspective, the combination of different theoretical perspectives enables an analysis of the multidimensional characteristics of social life. And as urban areas have become superdiverse, our sociological imagination may also be strengthened by building bridges between different, and sometimes conflicting, theoretical perspectives.

These perspectives merge the institutional meso-level and the micro-perspective of conviviality with ideals of the civil sphere in a superdiverse context. They allow us to take culture and solidarity seriously, acknowledge a changing urban reality and the potentiality of openness through interaction, without turning a blind eye to othering processes and status hierarchies.

Data and methods

We have used empirical data from one year of ethnographic fieldwork (2018/2019) in two middle schools in Stockholm: Rose Garden School (with around 300 students) and Carnation Garden School (close to 600 students). Tajic, who was responsible for the data collection, spent two days a week in each school. In addition, 42 interviews were conducted, 12 with NAMS (Table 1) and 30 with school staff (teachers, school management and multilingual classroom assistants). The interviews with students were between 33 and 58 minutes long. Interviews with school staff averaged 52 minutes in duration. Interviews were conducted after five months of participatory observations. In the present article, the interviews with the students and teachers are primarily utilized in addition to field observations. The students’ interviews focused on how NAMS experienced everyday life in school, regarding their feelings of belonging and learning support. The school staff interviews involved their thoughts and practices concerning pedagogical and social inclusion of NAMS. Students and staff members’ names are pseudonyms, and the project was approved by the Regional Ethical Review Board in Stockholm, Sweden.

Table 1 Characteristics of newly arrived students
Full size table

The combination of ethnography and interviewing allowed us to analyze how individual action and self-understandings concerning peer interaction are linked to shared meanings in school communities. Ethnography gave insights into how interactions construct the everyday lives of peer relations and learning, and the interviews illuminated the students’ emotional states and feelings of belonging (cf. Lamont and Swidler 2014).

Sweden has changed from being considered, although erroneously, a fairly homogenous country to becoming one of the nations in the world with the highest proportion of individuals of immigrant originFootnote 2 per capita. In 2020, 26% of the population in Sweden was either foreign born or had two parents born abroad (SCB 2021b).Footnote 3

Both Rose Garden School and Carnation Garden School are situated in neighborhoods in Stockholm with low socioeconomic indicators. In the public realm, these neighborhoods are characterized by what Wacquant (2007) would call territorial stigmatization. Rose Garden School is a plural-minorities school located in a neighborhood where about 80% of inhabitants have a foreign background. The neighborhood has a multiethnic mix of individuals from all around the globe, originating from the labor migration of the 1970s, while refugees have made up the majority of immigrants to the area during the past 30 years. Almost 90% of the students at Rose Garden School have a foreign background. About 30% of the parents have a post-secondary education, which is low in the Swedish context (the average is 60%). On the other hand, Carnation Garden School was located in an area with a historically majority white population. That changed at the beginning of the 21st century, when a significant influx of refugees altered the ethnic composition of the neighborhood. Today, about 70% of the inhabitants are of foreign origin, with one ethnic, non-Western group dominating. We define Carnation Garden School as a minority–majority school. About 80% of students at the school have a foreign background, and approximately 40% of parents have a post-secondary education.

A significant number of teachers who are non-white and/or have migration experiences themselves, around 50%, work at the schools. Their experiences welcoming newly arrived studentsFootnote 4 are considerable, and recently a noteworthy number of NAMS, in grades 7–9 (age group 13–15 years), have started school. Rose Garden School had 33 NAMS during Tajic’s fieldwork, which is 25% of the students in this middle school. Carnation Garden School had 34 NAMS, which constituted 15% of its student population. The percentage is calculated based on the number of students in grades 7–9 [högstadiet], and not students in the lower grades at the same schools.

In Sweden, it is not uncommon for students to spend time in the same class for either six or nine compulsory years of schooling. This means there is a fixed group of around 20 students who study most subjects together, except language choices and mother tongue tuition. The group can become rather tight, sometimes making it difficult, at least at first, for new students to find friends. The two schools have chosen different organizational models for NAMS. Carnation Garden School has chosen direct integration into mainstream classes, while Rose Garden School works with a model that uses specific placement of NAMS in a separate class (that they are allowed to remain in for a maximum of two years, according to Swedish legislation). Rose Garden School also has a pedagogic support structure where students born in the country or those who are longer-term residents and NAMS sometimes work in the same classroom (often through participation in sports, music, and art). Advocates of both approaches legitimize their choice of model using the same argument: inclusion (Tajic and Bunar 2020). In the present article, we focus on how students interact in mainstream classes and during breaks, where students with different backgrounds meet.

In our case, it has been important to analyze NAMS’ encounters with their new school and peers, because this is a group that tends to be segregated, marginalized and left to socialize with each other. Symbolic and social boundaries between NAMS and the rest of the class and school have repeatedly been identified (Nilsson Folke 2017; Juvonen 2015; Sharif 2017; Svensson 2017). But at the studied schools, Tajic was surprised by how smooth and relaxed the interaction between NAMS and other students could be. We see such a case as a good starting point for trying to understand the meaning of peer interaction, analyzed through the lens of the civil sphere, an institutional habitus of multicultural incorporation, and how conviviality is performed in practice in a superdiverse setting.

Transcribed interviews and field observations were imported to NVivo. Students’ ways of making sense of peer interaction and the meaning they put into finding friends were coded. The chosen analytical strategy is a form of thematic analysis (Braun and Clark 2006), where NVivo improved interoperability between different types of empirical data, the informants and the emerging analytical themes. This was possible through organization and classification of the unstructured data, which was accomplished by finding patterns and connections in the data using the program's various functions, such as search, annotation and case classification.

We do not generalize based on the presented empirical themes. But we do think our article can nuance state-of-the-art knowledge about the prerequisites of social and emotional belonging and learning for NAMS. Our theoretical take integrates superdiversity, conviviality and habitus into the framework of civil sphere theory, in this way making theoretical, or moderate, generalizations (Williams 2000) where our contribution is:

  • An analysis of the role of conviviality and peer interaction in superdiverse settings.

  • An attempt to explain how ideals of solidarity in the civil sphere and democratic citizenship correspond with practices of cooperation and friendship between students.

  • A micro-analysis of civil sphere theory, where it is possible to highlight the inclusive potential of education and see sociability as a way of fostering inclusive membership, instead of the dominant research focus on stigmatization and reproduction.

Findings

We empirically address our research question—“What can the meaning of peer interaction be within a superdiverse educational context?”—by first listening to how the teachers and school professionals talk about championing multicultural principles. Subsequently, we present the meaning of students’ interaction in a superdiverse context.

From the teacher perspective

The multicultural principles are illuminated by taking a closer look at how teachers think and act, and create a kind of harmony between ideals and practices, in relation to NAMS. Sensitivity to complexity, collective work and the conscious creation of an emotional atmosphere of belonging, where the physical school environment is utilized as a strategic stage for social and pedagogical inclusion (cf. Warikoo 2011), are empirical elements in which solidarity comes to the fore through the institutional habitus of a multicultural mode of incorporation.

Sensitivity to complexity

We are struck by the presence of professional reflexivity. Nothing is a given. Things change. Solutions and strategies can be both good and bad. Everything depends. Beyan, who works at Rose Garden School, often thinks: “I can’t stop wondering, am I doing this right or wrong? I often think about how I could do things better.” The professional practices encountered at the schools under study reveal lively negotiation of the pros and cons of how to be in the room, what tasks to offer and openness to re-evaluating and re-structuring previous choices.

In free periods between classes, teachers are often in conversation with each other, discussing the encounter between the school culture and NAMS.

During a lunch break at Rose Garden School, the teachers Mikaela, Anna Mia and Santiago are sharing experiences concerning how newly arrived students and their schoolwork change depending on who they hang out with. Anna Mia says: “The students who come new to Sweden are often the most ambitious, they study hard and work in a very focused way during the lessons. But after some time they become more and more like the peer group they hang out with.” The other teachers nod in affirmation. And they reflect on whether there are strategies they could work with to keep the newly arrived students “on the right track,” as Santiago puts it.

Being the teacher of a heterogenous group of students can be challenging enough. In addition, welcoming students to the class who are new to the Swedish school system and the Swedish language requires creative solutions. As Beyan explains:

Because, we have students who have such different school backgrounds and it’s not just FBK [separate classes], it’s also in the mainstream class, everyone has their experiences and their prerequisites and needs. So, trying to adapt to each student’s needs is not the easiest thing to do.

Teachers are not saying that differences are easy. But having a sensitivity to complexity creates an attitude that acknowledges that students’ skills are valuable resources. A sensitivity to complexity also provides the schools with everyday professional learning. The importance of collegial learning and support is often raised through reflexivity connected to real cases and dilemmas.

Collective work and emotions

Being sensitive to complexity is demanding, but there is no other choice. Beyan describes this work by saying: “We learn together. We develop together.” The teachers reflect and ask questions: “What did we do? Why did it not work? What can we improve?” This work routine is defined by Beyan as “collective reflections” and as being “of importance.” Research has also shown that, when it comes to an inclusive school culture, “embedded learning”—as a relational practice in teachers’ everyday work life—is “more beneficial than ad hoc courses or workshops” (Pantic et al. 2021).

Through collective work, the individual student who just arrived in Sweden is supported. Anders, who works at Carnation Garden School, points out that this is a collective responsibility: “They should feel [a welcoming atmosphere] from us teachers, but also from the rest of the school staff as well as from other students.” It is not just the responsibility of the Swedish as a second language teacher to work for inclusion of new students, it is an important task for the whole school, including teachers and students (see also Bunar 2015; Lund 2021). And this is facilitated by collaborative work among teachers, but also by collective work with students born in Sweden or those who are longer-term residents.

Monica, who works at Carnation Garden School, argues that the quality of peer relations is helped by the school being “very multicultural, so you can adjust pretty easily. And many of our students, though not the most recent, are Arabic speaking. And then they will smoothly become part of the class, as many speak Arabic.” In the fieldwork, it became evident that having a shared mother tongue, but also English as a shared school language, works as a bridge for peer interaction.

These migration-related differences inspire the teachers to collaborate with their students and to utilize the resources that students bring to the school. Teachers encourage students to serve as facilitators for NAMS concerning language and knowledge acquisition as well as social inclusion. To support NAMS, teachers need the help of students born in Sweden or those who are longer-term residents. They have created a form of mentorship between students. A student who has the same mother tongue, or who can communicate in English, is appointed to be supervisor of a newly arrived student. The motivation is emotional; it is to create connections between peers by making the newly arrived student feel comfortable and safe, thus making the choice to come to school every morning easier. The task is to inform and show how the school day is organized with temporal markers, or in the words of an interviewed teacher, it is “to make the everyday routines clear to the newly arrived student.” This can include the new student having someone to dine with during lunch hour, thus preventing “a feeling of loneliness.”

Asking students to assume responsibility for NAMS is a way of respecting their intercultural and social skills within the school. The institutional habitus of multicultural incorporation works toward a main goal: emotional safety.

The collective work of welcoming NAMS requires emotional work. The recognition of NAMS as individuals, and thus not a category, takes place in hallways, classrooms and other social scenes that the school day brings into a student’s life.

Focuse is on his way to work individually with his teacher Beyan. I [Tajic] accompany him. Focuse enters the classroom with a big smile. He and Beyan walk toward each other and they hug. Focuse is happy. Sharing the news with me and Beyan that he just passed in religion. Beyan is as happy as, or maybe even happier than, Focuse.

The school and the school grades represent a shared and highly emotional experience. Anders believes that inclusion is demonstrated in practice by how he and other teachers work with NAMS. “First of all,” he states, it is important “that they feel welcome.” He continues: “We want them to be here. It’s fun for us. They shouldn’t feel that they are a problem for the school.” According to Anders:

It’s important for school staff to give newly arrived students a great deal of encouragement. We try to do that repeatedly. All the time. That we give them our support. Also, in the hallway, for example, as an extra pat on the shoulder.

An “extra pat” from a teacher is a physical and symbolic gesture that says, “You are not nobody at school.” You are somebody. You have a valuable contribution to make at school and, hence, in society.

If we read between the lines, the description of the importance of actively seeing and supporting the newly arrived student also implicitly challenges the notion that NAMS pose a present threat. Teachers with experience working with NAMS are aware of how recently arrived children and youth may be overlooked, made invisible or categorized as a homogenous group that is lacking in resources (Bunar 2015). Perhaps this is why Anders and his colleagues remind themselves that NAMS are unique human beings: “When we welcome a new student, we need to see that person as an individual.” And frequent use of the word “we” speaks to the presence of an institutional habitus. It is the school institution thinking as well as acting, creating a kind of harmony between ideals and practices.

Teachers’ collective work results in professional practices in which they remind each other to continue to be sensitive to complexity, through the schemes of perception of the institutional habitus of multicultural incorporation. This is particularly clear when they make conscious efforts to move away from deficit discourses about NAMS.

The school environment

The interior decor and websites of both schools have a welcoming aesthetic. Inclusive pedagogy greets physical and online visitors. The school walls are decorated with written messages and pictures that advocate equality and human rights. Pictures on the schools’ websites show, for example, girls and boys with different complexions, joined in friendship and learning processes, accompanied by words saying that it is the responsibility of everyone at school to work for equal education. The value of multiculturality is presented as a self-evident position and construed as a strength.

An institutional habitus of multicultural incorporation also needs to be materialized. Spaces are used in conscious ways to foster sociability among the students in these superdiverse settings. Sofija, who is responsible for organizing multilingual classroom assistance at Rose Garden School, suggests that the welcoming atmosphere is linked to the classrooms’ location. In her view, it is wrong for NAMS, when they are in separate classes, to be located in the periphery of the school area or even in buildings that are not connected with the main school building. It is also wrong if classes for students born in Sweden, longer-term residents and NAMS have different schedules and never meet during breaks. Cohabitation should engender equality and time usage at school should increase students’ opportunities to actually interact. As Sofija puts it:

The best integration is when the classroom of the separate class is centrally located within the school. So, teachers, and other school staff, see this class as just one class among all the other classes. As an ordinary class. All students, irrespective of whether they are newly arrived or not, need to share breaks and lunch hours. They should also collectively and actively participate in joint activities at school, where groups and classes are mixed during thematic work tasks. Every teacher needs to participate in joint activities as well. And teachers working with separate classes need to be positive and not say: “Ahhh, but our students, they can’t speak Swedish and they can’t keep up, it’s just a pain for them.”

It is also important to Beyan that NAMS find the teaching meaningful. She gives an example of what a teacher must not do when trying to incorporate a newly arrived student into a group of students who are not newly arrived:

Well, you can sit and work with this book that’s a bit easier while we’re working on our things. Then, you don’t feel included. It is important to get a good start.

A sense of belonging is created not just by being included in the group, but also through the learning experience and teaching material. Tracking, or receiving assignments that are less challenging, can cause students to feel othered. The everyday conviviality of teaching is the practice of avoiding situations where NAMS are put at risk of being labeled in terms of their intellectual capacities.

NAMS should receive the same prerequisites as all other students. According to Beyan, this includes a sense of entitlement, a sense that everyone, despite time in the country, can “influence their own learning.” Equity—in the sense of achieving a democratic schooling experience that facilitates students’ abilities to influence their everyday life at school—is high on the interviewed teachers’ agenda. Teachers are using their professionality to shape a situational ethics in which the learning process is undertaken with the newly arrived student, instead of only for him or her (Banks 2011; Lund 2021).

Conviviality among teachers is seen in relation to the dimensions of sensitivity to complexity, collective work and emotions as well as how the school environment is used as a stage for inclusion. The empirical examples of everyday conviviality among teachers are their professional reflexivity, collegial learning and shared responsibility for working in line with a mode of multicultural incorporation. In practice this means that students’ skills, connected to migration-related differences, are valued as resources and that teachers work to promote students’ emotional belonging in school by supporting them both pedagogically and socially through openness and solidarity. The everyday conviviality teachers embody engenders a view of migrant students as individuals, and not as a category. Hence, it is through collective work that the individual is made. The individual new student coming to the school is, seemingly paradoxically, less likely to be labeled as belonging to the category “newly arrived” through the collective work done at the school level. When it is the whole school’s responsibility to bring about social inclusion, and not just one teacher’s responsibility to welcome a newly arrived student, the student is acknowledged as an individual.

From the student perspective

The schools are organized around multicultural principles. These principles shape teachers’ understandings of their work and their interaction with students. The vast majority of school actors internalize these values, and this is manifested in the students’ relationships with one another. Teachers who care and show that they like their students demonstrate that they believe in their students and recognize their capabilities in ways that create a sense of being valuable (Trondman 2016). Hence, the teachers carry a message to the students—they are capable not only of learning, but also of interacting with each other in these superdiverse environments.

Reflecting on her experience at her former school (a school characterized by homogenous Swedish nativity in another Stockholm neighborhood), Rita recounts: “No one talked to me. I had no friends. I was all by myself.” But things changed when she moved to Carnation Garden School. “On my first day at school, I met many friends. Everyone started talking with me.” In comparison to how she felt at her former school, she describes her current life in school using positive language. She says that her emotional state can best be described by one simple word: “ordinariness.” She says, “I feel like everyone else. There’s no difference [between me and my friends].” The results of the collective work of teachers “enter into” students’ relational practices. Everyday conviviality enables Rita not to feel different. Being new in Sweden and in the school can be ordinary. Being ordinary means being seen as an individual. In peer interactions, you are then made sense of by others as one among all of us. You belong to the “we” of the school. Visible, not neglected. Respected, not harassed.

If Rita has experienced changes in her friendship situation when moving from one school to the other, from being “othered” through involuntary isolation from white Swedish peers to a feeling of being just like everyone else and hence embodying a non-stranger position of unproblematic belonging, then Focuse is telling a story in which not feeling othered is his first school experience in Sweden at Rose Garden School. His first days in school were smooth and playful, and he makes references to his own personality being well matched with the school’s atmosphere: “I’m an open person. So, when I entered the school, nobody treated me badly. Everyone was in a cheerful mood.” During a break, he went outside and saw the soccer field where boys from the school were engaged in a game.

I just jumped in. I started to play. I was good. They told me: “You’re really good. You should walk with us.” That was it. Then we started talking.

Focuse is not just a talented soccer player, he is also an entertainer. Six months before the summer break, there was a musical performance at school.

Many students at the school don’t have the guts [to take the stage]. But I was brave enough. I got up on the stage and I sang. I’m not good at Swedish, but I wrote a song in Swedish anyway.

He continues: “Everyone at school liked my performance. Now, they say that I’m the star of the school!” Focuse was not belittled or put down. He was supported and able to keep his confidence and to shine. Conviviality on a school level supports students by providing a welcoming atmosphere, where space is used to encourage interaction. Such an approach has the potential to create emotional security for students who have just come to Sweden.

Sara, who attends Rose Garden School, says: “I spend time with everyone in the class.” A feeling of “ease” and unquestioned belonging follows the mutual recognition that comes with unproblematic cohabitation. Marija, from Carnation Garden School, simply states: “I feel at home.” She says that it is easy to talk with everyone in the class about school and leisure interests. Marija attends a couple of classes at school where she does not have any close friends. Even there, she does not feel alone. Instead: “I feel a form of companionship, where I can talk and communicate.” In her own class she found two close friends, one with whom she has a lot of things in common and one with whom she has little in common: “We may have different opinions, but there’s still something that brings us together.” Marija and Sara illuminate how everyday conviviality can include the multidimensionality of interactions. They hang out with everyone in the class. Marija does not feel invisible in the classes she attends only a couple of times week and has found close friends in her own class. Everyday conviviality enables unproblematic interaction and is a prerequisite for, but not always an automatic gateway to, friendship. Rita, Focuse, Sara and Marija are made sense of as individuals who have social and cultural value in the schools. To paraphrase Bourdieu (2000, p. 143), the students feel at home in the school because the school is also in them, in the form of habitus.

Two years ago, Ranuga, from Sri Lanka, resettled in Sweden. When imagining what it would be like to be a new person in the country, he was anxious and anticipated a harsh experience of being categorized as the “other” in the eyes of the other students. But his encounter with Rose Garden School changed his view.

At first, I was afraid of the new school. I thought they [other students] might want to fight with me. But it was totally different.

Straightaway, Ranuga made friends and his fear of being bullied could be put aside. The cautious feeling he had about going to school changed. “When I came to school and got to know some friends, I felt that it was really fun.” The other students at school invited him: “They thought he can be with us,” explains Ranuga. Friendship-making is made sense of through his own self-understanding, which also corresponds with how he thinks his classmates see him, i.e., as a “good and helpful person.” He never feels involuntarily alone or segregated during the school day. When Ranuga is summarizing his everyday mood, he frankly states: “I feel fucking good.”

Kirre, a boy from Syria who has been in Sweden for two years, felt lonesome at Carnation Garden School to begin with. He remembers one day when he was entering the school dining hall—a socially exposed space where students without someone to interact with become very visible, like being on a stage where who you hang out with reflects who you are.

One time I was in the school dining hall. They [other students] saw me standing by myself. They felt sorry for me. They didn’t know who I was. Then, one of them reached out and said: “Come, come. Sit with us.” Then we started to talk and now I know pretty much everyone at school.

The collective work of welcoming new students to the school is done through the institutional habitus of multicultural incorporation and is not just something the teacher does. It is also performed by the students themselves. They are not looking in the other direction, but acknowledging that the face of another human being is a face they have collective responsibility for.

A common fieldnote during the ethnographic work was connected to how often and with what great intensity students with different migration histories were spending time together. It did not seem to matter who you were with regard to the number of years in Sweden or ethnic background.

October. A Wednesday afternoon. Math is on the schedule. While waiting for the class to start, I [Tajic] am hanging out in the corridor. Focuse is close by. Chatting and laughing with 15 other boys from his and other classes. They are all talking different versions of Swedish. Focuse is popular. Before they split up for their different classes, a couple of boys give Focuse a hug. Focuse looks at me and smiles a bit, our eyes meet, and it is as if he’s saying, “See, I’m a person of value.”

Everyday conviviality and learning

In the above section, we presented NAMS’ experiences of more or less immediate incorporation into significant relations at the studied schools, changing fear into relief, loneliness into companionship, non-belonging into belonging. The possibility to interact with peers is often materialized in between lessons, the main acts in school, during breaks and when moving between classrooms (Lundström 2020). But we can also find examples of everyday conviviality during lessons and in learning processes.

First, there is an atmosphere of support and care. Just as the teachers believe in their students, the students believe in each other’s capacities and support students who are new to the country as best they can, helping them to understand and follow the teaching. Moreover, students who are not newly arrived listen to and learn from the NAMS, and let them excel, as shown in the article’s introductory fieldnote. An atmosphere of mutual companionship characterizes the school culture. They see one another as learning subjects. Rita describes the classroom atmosphere in the following manner: “In my class, we fit really well together. We’re all friends. We always talk with each other, everyone is smart, and they raise their hands.” Sometimes, specific knowledge is needed. Here, the superdiversity of the schools is an asset. Different mother tongues, knowledge in English and Swedish become important ways to learn new languages and to follow the teaching. Sara receives help from a friend in class who speaks a language related to her own mother tongue: Serbian. She explains that their communication “sometimes is in Macedonian, sometimes in Swedish as she was born here and it’s easier for her to speak Swedish. So, we do it fifty-fifty.” In the schools under study, there are students born in Sweden, but also students who came to Sweden as small children. Elif gets help from one of her friends. “She came to Sweden many years ago. So, if I don’t understand something during a lesson, I ask her. She always knows.”

Focuse and his friends have found a way to understand each other by speaking English. But they are also helping him improve his Swedish language skills. When his friends speak in Swedish, he has worked out a strategy: “I repeat the words and take them in.” Focuse emphasizes: “Yes, that’s how I learn Swedish.” Marija has a similar experience. Her closest friend resettled in Sweden about five years ago. “She’s good at Swedish. And we speak Swedish with each other. For example, if something is hard to grasp during a physics lesson, she explains it to me in English.”

The important combination of teachers and friends comes through in Emilia’s description of the temporal and relational process of mastering a new language. At first, she remembers:

It was weird. Everyone spoke Swedish and I didn’t understand. Just a couple of words I learned a month before school started. I had to learn Swedish. Everyone helped me in school, they explained what I didn’t understand. The teachers explained it in English. I also found friends who spoke English with me. And now, when someone asks me about something, I always answer in Swedish.

Peer interaction is important to language learning processes, but also to the concrete subjects, as Marija points out. But in school, learning takes place that is less explicit, because it is more hidden between the lines of the official curriculum and the implicit routines and norms of school. Students born in Sweden or longer-term residents prove useful when other students wish to acquire knowledge about the hidden curriculum. Elif explains that, both during and after the lessons, she needs meta-communication with peers about what is actually going on in the classroom: “Things that I don’t know, things that I don’t understand. What am I supposed to do? Now or after a test. What should we study?”

A conversation with Kirre sums up the interconnectedness of peer interactions, or more specifically, friendship. It brings meaning to the school day in the form of a social dimension that is important to well-being and school achievement.

Interviewer: What is important for you to feel good at school?

Kirre: At school? You need to have friends.

Interviewer: So, the social bit is important to you?

Kirre: Yes!

Interviewer: And, what would you say is important to you in relation to learning things in school?

Kirre: My friends, because they help me a lot.

But there is no magic solution to school achievement just because you have a friend. A student may be socially included in a constellation of friends and enjoy positive emotional energies and a feeling of belonging without performing particularly well in school. Marko’s school grades dropped as an effect of being in a circle of friends who, in his own words, “don’t value school as something important.” Friends and learning are framed in the double project of relations and knowledge at school (Crosnoe et al. 2003; Lundström 2020).

Everyday conviviality is seen in the performance of solidarity in the analyzed peer interactions. Students born in Sweden or longer-term residents see, care about and invite NAMS to take part in peer interaction, letting NAMS shine in classes and in sports. They help NAMS out with the school subjects, language acquisition and with interpreting the hidden curriculum. They help each other with school-related subjects, and NAMS’ skills are also enjoyed outside the classroom, on the soccer field and on stage. And they become friends. Friendship is empirical evidence showing that students born in the country, longer-term residents and NAMS recognize each other as equals—as individuals have both resources and needs. In this mutual recognition, subject meets subject, which becomes life-giving grace. Or as the philosopher Martin Buber puts it: “True humanity is created in genuine encounters” (2008, p. 34). The outcomes of true humanity are emotional security, friendship and a feeling of ordinariness. But not everything started out smoothly. At least not at Carnation Garden School.

Othering processes and assimilation

Multicultural incorporation, assimilation and being “othered” come to matter simultaneously. School is a very important institution in young people’s lives. But the wider society, family and specific peer relations matter as well. Not everything has been easy for the NAMS. Tajic noted changes in peer constellations during the fieldwork and found opportunities to talk with students about how feelings of belonging and peer relations changed over time. Coming to a new country and being “othered” is also, at least temporally and to some extent, part of the story.

Symbolic boundaries of belonging—connected to myths of primordialism, resulting in questioned belonging and feelings of being an outsider—are also illuminated in the data. Marija looks back on her first days at Carnation Garden School and recalls:

It was very difficult. They bullied me. It was difficult. New country, new language, new society, new teachers. Everything. It was hard. […] For example, once when it was lunch time, some students asked if I wanted to hang out and when I sat down with them, they just got up, and said they were done eating and went and sat down at another table. But now it’s much better.

Leo remembers what his evaluation of the Swedish school was after a couple of days at the school:

The Swedish school, I thought they hated people they don’t know. […] When I started in sixth grade, I was bullied. I cried. I don’t know how to tell you this. But, they didn’t like people who came from another country.

This bullying situation at Carnation Garden School continued until he started seventh grade. He shrugs his shoulders as if a cold wind were blowing through the room while continuing to describe the vulnerability of being targeted as an undesirable object. His story illuminates how a young person manages to escape a real war zone in Syria only to step into another kind of violent zone in a Swedish classroom.

I sat in the classroom. I was alone. And I was afraid of everyone. They bullied me and threw erasers at me. [---] In Syria I had friends, but not when I came to Sweden. But, now I have friends again.

The frustration that came with being alone, bullied and not understanding the language also created an emotional reaction. For a period of time, Leo was openly aggressive.

Not being able to communicate in Swedish, the normative language of self-evident status, had been an implicit reason for social closure? Both Kirre and Leo recall how they were at first treated as outsiders because they could not communicate with peers in Swedish. And even though they shared their mother tongue with some of the students, who were born in Sweden but had a Syrian background just like Leo and Kirre, the students refused to communicate in any language other than Swedish. Leo knows today that some of these students can even speak Arabic, but then, when he was new, they pretended that “they couldn’t speak Arabic.” Hence, the mother tongue can be used in both an inclusive and an exclusionary manner.

Multicultural incorporation, like everyday conviviality, is not always automatic. And there are borders that are less easy to cross. There is, as pointed to by Alexander (1995), no neat fit between theoretical perspectives and the “nitty-gritty” of everyday life.

Our research found that more students experienced marginalization at Carnation Garden School than at Rose Garden School. Why the social drama between incorporation processes and boundaries of belonging—us and them—occurs in the sample from Carnation Garden School and not the one from Rose Garden School may have at least two explanations. Carnation Garden School has less of an element of multiethnicity in the student population compared to Rose Garden School. Both schools have a large share of students with an immigrant background, but Carnation Garden School and its surrounding community constitute a “minority–majority setting”; it is foremost one ethnic group that dominates the social space in number. This school also welcomes NAMS directly into mainstream classes, while Rose Garden School and its surrounding constitute a “plural-minorities setting.” Moreover, NAMS in Rose Garden School learn some basic Swedish in a separate class before entering classes with students born in the country or longer-term residents; they quickly become part of the class, where their basic knowledge of Swedish works as a support structure for making friends.

There is also an example of a newly arrived student who chooses not to befriend anyone at Rose Garden School. Enkhbat is disappointed because he thought he would be able to meet white ethnic Swedish students. A multiethnic school was not what he expected or wanted. As a result, he self-isolated and displayed his disinterest in finding new friends at school, and as a consequence his school results also dropped during the fieldwork.

His own explanation for why he is not interested in making friends at school is connected to the lack of people with the “right” ethnicity. He explains that he prefers to hang out with peers from his country of origin or individuals who have a white Swedish socio-cultural identity: “I just want to have Mongolian friends or be with a Swede.” He says that individuals with other ethnic backgrounds “are hard to hang out with” and exemplifies by saying he is not interested in becoming friends with “a Kurd or a Turk.” Here we can see how his own background and white swedishness assert themselves as unmarked, as positions without ethnicity, as universal and transcendent and, therefore, worthy and deserving, whereas ethnicities such as Kurdish or Turkish are marked as “the other” in Enkhbat’s eyes. To him, befriending what we interpret as his way of seeing marked ethnicity may constantly remind him that he is not part of society. Enkbath may be struggling with an internal dialogue concerning who the ideal person is to whom he could be close and who would make him feel emotionally at home.

Friendship is important to achieving a sense of belonging and the desirable feeling of ordinariness. Friendship has consequences for school grades, but not always automatically and in a positive sense (Flashman 2012). Moreover, not all students appreciate a multiethnic school. The experience of othering processes is the dark side of the everyday life of some newly arrived students. But this is a situation that can change. Among the students in the analyzed data, everyone, expect Enkhbat, has close friends at school. Still, some friendship constellations expect the participants to assimilate to a specific group culture.

In one interview, Kirre shares how he has been affected by, or felt social pressure to adjust to, norms concerning clothes and manners. He indicates that it is not always easy to be different from his friends. His own change is connected to: “My clothes and how I’m behaving. […] Well, the clothes, everyone likes to wear well-known brands. […] And we act like we’re cool.” It was different in Syria, according to Kirre. In Syria he did not experience the same expectations among his friends about wearing the “right” kind of clothes or behaving in a specific manner.

Thus, behavior and material status symbols can speak the language of assimilation, at least in certain friendship constellations. Concerning cultural complexity, a school culture can have an overarching mode of multicultural incorporation, where students and teachers embody conviviality, but pockets of othering processes and forces of cultural assimilation can exist simultaneously.

And even when friends have been made, there may be a dark shadow that hinges on the school choice to begin with, because selecting a specific school (which is possible in Sweden) may be an active choice based on multiethnic composition. Elif was happy that Rose Garden School had many NAMS. She did not want to be “alone” and says that it has been “good” for her. The reason she wanted to go to a school where NAMS were not a novelty is explained by her fear of meeting white ethnic Swedes. “If I would have gone to a school with many Swedes, they wouldn’t have wanted me there,” she says.

A final comment on this last empirical theme is that, even in multiethnic friendship constellations where students born in Sweden, longer-term residents and NAMS participate, we can still find a symbolic boundary that is rarely transcended. A recurring pattern of homophily concerning gender is that girls hang out with girls and boys hang out with boys (Vincent et al. 2018). At Carnation Garden School, there is also another pattern. Black Muslim girls wearing the hijab can be called into question as a group, also by NAMS who do not share their religious beliefs. Marko muses: “I’m not a fan of them. I can understand that it’s religion, but wearing these veils when it’s 30 degrees outdoors. I can just imagine how unpleasant it must be underneath it. But it’s their religion and not mine, and I don’t want to interfere.” Still, he says that there are groups of students at the school who deliberately distance themselves from, “Black and veiled” people, as Marko calls them. He continues: “They don’t say anything to them, but they don’t like them. They simply don’t want to be in their company.” Even in a superdiverse city, where conviviality can be found in specific institutions characterized by multicultural incorporation, there are still othering processes and status hierarchies to be found.

Conclusion

The neighborhoods and schools in the present article have a long history of welcoming new members from different parts of the world. Generations of immigrants have resettled in the surroundings and studied at the schools. And schools can be meaningful places that stabilize and give permanency to ideals and practices. We found it theoretically helpful to acknowledge changes toward superdiversity and to be open to the potential of having an increased presence of sensitivity to complexity in schools. Professional practice and peer interaction within education can express solidarity through everyday conviviality against the backdrop of the civil sphere, “materialized” through an institutional habitus that privileges multicultural incorporation.

Peer interaction within a superdiverse setting generates meaning, which brings us to our analysis of what could be called the call, or a phenomenology, of ordinariness. One common way of addressing social and emotional belonging among NAMS, in the studied schools, is to use the unpretentious word “ordinary.” The cultural significance of being ordinary as a lived experience highlights the inseparability of social space, body and mind. Peer interaction and friendship help a student become a culturally legitimate individual at school. We evaluate our own self-worth through how we believe others see us and how this is connected to shared cultural values (Cooley 1922), such as having friends, e.g., being seen as unproblematic, and not shameful, to hang out with. The social stage of school enhances the value of peer interaction because other students confirm one’s existence and value by being the audience for everyday social performances (Alexander 2004; Lundström 2020). Peer interaction and friendship are relations that signal mutual affection. Hanging out with or being friends with students born in Sweden or longer-term residents transcends the position of having a body that is associated with “otherness.” Instead of being “stopped”—symbolically and quite literally—the newly arrived student can become one with the space, which increases freedom of movement. The emotional structure of “ordinariness” is then about being unmarked and being able to pass as a student among other students—and not categorized as an “import” or “fresh off the boat.” A self-understanding of belonging in the school and the wider community is thus formed, i.e., the “body-at-home” (Ahmed 2007, p. 153). Being ordinary means being seen as an equal, and not as a stigmatized “other” who is in need of support and special treatment.

The cultural ideal according to which friendship consists of expectations of freedom of choice between equals (Lundström 2020) makes it possible to view the institutional habitus of multicultural incorporation as a lived civil sphere, where NAMS are valued as a self-evident part of a shared humanity. This involves an everyday conviviality of grassroots solidarity forming a social scene in which a sense of belonging is realized through a relational process between peers who interact by seeing, caring about, supporting, and admiring each other as well as taking part in mutual learning processes. And when peer interaction is there, friendship bonds can be formed. Peer interaction and friendship are thus meaningful per se and need not be analyzed as an exchange value for social capital. They rather constitute the emotional security of being seen as human.

So, for newly arrived youth, sense making of peer interaction can be explained by the desire to be ordinary. Ordinariness is made possible in a superdiverse context characterized by everyday conviviality between peers. Valuable interactions confirm self-worth and create a positive emotional state of mind. As illustrated in the empirical section by Kirre, when he states that friends are the meaning of his school day—they are important to his well-being and school achievement.

Adolescence is a specific life stage in which friendship is of great cultural and social importance. Friends are part of the process of seeking distance from one’s family; of growing one’s wings. Moreover, in a situation where a young person is new to a country, having a friend who belongs to the population that is not newly arrived becomes a symbol of hope and a shared future.Footnote 5 But ordinariness, in the sense of belonging on the same terms as any other young person in the country, also illustrates the existent risk of being questioned. The call of ordinariness brings to the fore the shadow of “otherness.”

Dominating discourses code socioeconomically segregated and ethnically marked neighborhoods as uncivil, dangerous and out of control (Dahlstedt 2018; Ålund et al. 2017). In the public discourse on socioeconomically and ethnically segregated neighborhoods, we often encounter stories told in negative terms—stories about schools with unmotivated students and where young men with immigrant backgrounds are coded as criminals and sexual predators (Voyer 2018; Lainpelto 2019; Herz 2019). But the reality is different. The institutional habitus of multicultural incorporation, with its everyday conviviality among teachers and students, breathes solidarity through the embodied responsibility for the face of a stranger. People show in action who they are, in this way depicting the culture they are forming and are formed by.

A civil sphere is never a finalized achievement, but an ongoing project (Alexander 2006). At the studied schools, there are also pockets of temporary exclusion, gendered boundaries, islamophobia, racism and friendship constellations that entail pressure to conform to certain styles of clothing and behaviors. NAMS also describe their fear of being a “lesser” participant in society, as they relate to their awareness that nativity and whiteness are potential exclusionary criteria and gate keepers to universalism. Sweden is currently a highly discriminatory country, where whiteness (Western names and nativity) is treated as a credential (Bursell 2012; Quillian et al. 2019).

But, above all, the empirical examples in the present article demonstrate social and pedagogical inclusion of NAMS—between teachers and students and between students. They reveal school communities serving as mediators of civil sphere values. Educational institutions are of sociological interest if we wish to study change. Meso-level institutions can influence both individuals’ attitudes and macro-level structures (Ray 2019). Change on these levels is often a result of meso-processes—and in this regard, we should not forget the formative role of education in socializing democratic citizens (Honneth 2015). This concerns the universal hope for a civil sphere that is also “a structure of feeling. It is defined by the experience of solidarity, by a feeling of identity with, or at least empathy for every other member of one’s own society” (Alexander 2010, pp. 9–10).

We need civil translators (Alexander 2006) who can narrate images and stories from margins other than the prevailing ones—images and stories that disturb dominant discourses and moderate notions of the “right” and “wrong” places to be attracted to in the urban landscape. We need social scientists who, without being blind to problems, also describe and analyze socially productive processes that include support structures and everyday conviviality and that show people who can live together. We need a discursive change—other “speech acts” (Austin 1975)—that makes seeing, treating and recognizing each other as equals completely self-evident, as evidenced by the peer interaction across migration-related differences portrayed in the present article.