Being Highly Skilled and a Refugee: Experiences of Non-European Physicians in Sweden

Abstract: The thesis refines the analytical categories of ‘refugee’ and ‘highly skilled migrant’ by exploring the experiences of non-European medical doctors who came to Sweden as refugees. As a narrative research study, the thesis is based on seven in-depth semi-structured interviews with refugee doctors who live in Sweden. By employing Van Hear’s concept of mixed migration and the notions of human, social and cultural capital, the thesis accounts for the interconnectedness of research participants’ migratory and professional trajectories. The analysis of the complex criss-crossing of their doctor and refugee identities makes use of Brubaker and Cooper’s concepts of identification and categorization, and self-understanding and social location which are further developed by Jenkins’ theory on social identity and Anthias’ concept of translocational positionality. The thesis concludes that these individuals’ migratory trajectories cannot be ranked as either forced or voluntary, but have to be conceptualized in terms of mixed migratory movements. In the same vein, the thesis points to the processual nature of identity which is always partly self-constructed and partly determined by the external categorizations, and hence pleads against the essentialization of migrants’ identities, be it that of a ‘refugee’ or ‘highly skilled migrant’.