Rites without Passage: The Civic Conversion of Young Refugees in Contemporary Germany

The backdrop of Germany’s ‘refugee crisis’ thrusts matters of deep symbolic relevance into public consciousness, transforming ‘the refugee’ into a potent figure for imagining political community. As the drama of the ‘refugee crisis’ settles into an ‘integration through education’ program, vocational school faculty grapple with incorporating diverse sets of newcomers. Young asylum-seeking students negotiate within this deeply uncertain context, weaving routes to belonging that traverse ambivalent discourses and complex bureaucracies. Qualitative analysis and selective sampling are used to uncover dynamics of mixed-contact that emerge in a vocational school’s project of civic remediation. Research data include interviews with program faculty and students (N=32) and samples of professional materials used in the field site. Data analysis uncovers the rite of civic conversion, a set of dramatic movements through which the construction of social difference is simultaneously concealed, defeated, and rendered legitimate. Though expressed in distinct forms, civic conversion distances refugee students from pathologized aspects of an imagined social past (exit) and induces scenarios for students to rhetorically cast off the presumed pathologies of their past, present, and future (renewal). This rite consecrates a dividing line between those who must ritually distance themselves from an assigned ‘deficiency’ and those who need not. The problems, functions, and implications of this rite are discussed in relation to their macro-sociological consequences.