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A Better Life for the Children of Exile: Intergenerational Adaptation of the Descendants of Refugees

Project description

Understanding the lives of children and grandchildren of refugees

More than 2.5 million refugees have been granted residence in Europe over the last ten years. A lot is known about the inequalities that are experienced by immigrants who arrive as refugees, but much less is known about their children’s lives. Aiming to fill this gap in research, the EU-funded project REFU-GEN will establish a new framework for intergenerational adaptation by comparing four domains of life for the descendants of refugees: (1) their education, income and employment, (2) their family formation, (3) where and how they live, and (4) their health. Using cutting-edge research methods to analyse longitudinal data for the whole population of Sweden, REFU-GEN represents the first comprehensive intergenerational study of refugees, their children and their grandchildren.

Objective

More than 2.5 million refugees have been granted residence in Europe over the last ten years and their long-run adaptation is a fundamental societal challenge. Adaptation can only be evaluated over the long-run by making intergenerational comparisons between immigrants and their descendants, yet research has almost entirely overlooked this topic for refugees, not least because most countries lack both data and significant numbers of descendants of refugees. Prior studies focus on isolated domains of life and are limited by small-samples, methodological weaknesses, and a failure to compare the descendants of refugees and non-refugees.

This proposal represents the first comprehensive intergenerational study of the descendants of refugees. My aim is to establish a new framework for the adaptation of refugees descendants across four domains of life: socio-economic status, health, family formation and residential context. I will use cutting-edge research methods to analyse longitudinal data for the whole population of Sweden from 1968-2019. Thanks to the unique combination of this comprehensive data, and Swedens long history as a refugee-receiving country, I will be able to make ground-breaking contributions:

[1] To reveal the diverse nature of intergenerational adaptation for the second-generation children of refugees, and establish to what extent this is determined by their parents adaptation

[2] To uncover the mechanisms of intergenerational adaptation for the second-generation children of refugees

[3] To establish the nature and extent of intergenerational adaptation beyond the second generation, for third-generation grandchildren of refugees

Answers to these questions have the potential to generate enormous gains in understanding, and establish a much-needed holistic evidence base concerning the long-run adaptation of the descendants of refugees. I will use Sweden as a laboratory to develop theories that can be generalised to other European countries.

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Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-STG - Starting Grant

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2020-STG

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Host institution

STOCKHOLMS UNIVERSITET
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 406 237,00
Address
UNIVERSITETSVAGEN 10
10691 Stockholm
Sweden

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Region
Östra Sverige Stockholm Stockholms län
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 406 237,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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