The (un)celebrated asylum centre: How Danish media hijacked an ethnographic fieldwork and altered local realities

Abstract

Denmark’s oldest asylum centre has been in operation in the small town of Jelling since 1993. Here, over time, the institutions of the local community and the asylum centre have merged, spatially and socially. Today, a local daycare centre and the local after-school club operate on the premises of the asylum centre. Based on an ethnographic study of the everyday institutional neighbourliness between ‘asylum centre’ and ‘local community’ in this small Danish town, this tale from the field pertains to the overwhelming national media attention that hit the research case halfway through its term – and unpacks how public media collaboration came to alter the very local state of affairs that I was in the middle of studying. It is argued how, more than simply dissemination partners or collaborators, ‘the media’ instead turned into actual co-creators of the ethnographic field – and so of the concrete empirical findings and analyses.

Collaborating with ‘the media’: An end activity or the beginning of a new ending?

‘In Jelling, they drop off their children at daycare in the middle of the asylum centre.’ This was the headline on the website of Danmarks Radio, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (hereafter, ‘Radio Denmark’) on Monday, 7 November 2016, the night before the US presidential election (Danish time). What the headline was referring to was the neighbourly relationship that had come into being in the small Danish town of Jelling (population 3400) between local community institutions and an asylum centre operating as an accommodation unit for people awaiting decision in their asylum case; a neighbourly relationship formed by the everyday encounters between asylum seekers and local citizens and the spatial interweaving of their institutions in a shared space. The social workings and mundane interactions of this everyday ‘institutional neighbourliness’ (Larsen, 2019) which had emerged between asylum centre and local community in this small Southern Jutland town were the subject of a 3-year ethnographic study I was conducting. At the time, I was halfway through the phase of fieldwork.

The asylum centre, run by the Danish Red Cross, was placed by the state in Jelling in 1993. Today, it is the oldest accommodation centre in operation in Denmark (in fact, another Danish asylum centre popularly called ‘Sandholmlejren’ dates back to 1989, but which operates as a reception centre, not an accommodation centre). At the time of the fieldwork, the asylum centre in Jelling was hosting up to three hundred asylum seekers. Over time, several of the town’s local daycare facilities, including a daycare centre and a combined youth club and after-school centre (hereafter, ‘after-school club’), were opened on the asylum centre premises in two buildings leased from the centre. This means that in order to drop off and pick up their children from the local daycare centre, these parents literally have to go through an asylum centre every day. As I have stated elsewhere (Larsen, 2019), this is unparalleled elsewhere in Denmark:

One sees an unusual spatial co-presence and social entanglement of asylum seekers and established inhabitants moving about and sharing residential and institutional public space within and around the asylum centre area in Jelling to an extent not seen anywhere else in the Danish landscape of asylum (Larsen, 2019: 78).

Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted with local inhabitants and asylum seekers in the village-sized town of Jelling and its asylum centre area in 2016 and 2017, I set out to explore the underlying social conditions behind this specific local migratory outcome, the overall aim being to contribute new knowledge about the everyday practices of multi-ethnic co-residency outside an urban cosmopolitan setting and beyond the view of national public discourse (for an expansion of this aim, see Larsen, 2019).

A few days before Radio Denmark ran the headline, I received a phone call from a journalist from the newsroom. They had come across my research project on the university website and in view of the upcoming US presidential election half a week ahead, they wanted to run a story on it on the television evening news show (TV Avisen). The exact linkage seemed unclear to me, but the journalist was quick to enlighten me. ‘People can’t stay focused on such a huge macro-political event for that many hours at a time’, he confided in me, ‘unless it’s broken up by an everyday, contrasting story which, first, people can actually see themselves reflected in but, second, that’s positive but not about any great event and, third, that nevertheless surprises you, maybe even shocks you.’

The everyday co-residency and institutional neighbourliness between the asylum centre and the local community in Jelling met all three of these criteria, said the news editor – the ‘shocking’ element being the fact that a local daycare had been located for more than 10 years in a building leased from the asylum centre and located on its premises. This seemingly with no fear or notable concern among the local parents, whose toddlers napped in their prams every day after lunch in the middle of the asylum centre area. ‘Normally’, said the journalist, ‘primarily in the media we hear about local people objecting to opening up an asylum centre, or paying out for tall fences round their properties to secure themselves against one’. The Radio Denmark newsroom now wanted a positive story – albeit primarily intended not to serve as a counter-narrative to negatively angled news stories about asylum centre locations, but to the global drama of the US presidential election. I agreed to cooperate on the desired news story about my ethnographic field site and put the journalist and editor of the television evening news programme in contact with the relevant people in Jelling.

The following day, a Radio Denmark journalist and camera operator went to the village of Jelling, located in the southern part of the Danish peninsula of Jutland, 200 km and about two and a half hours drive west of the capital of Copenhagen. Here they spent the day and the evening, interviewing local townspeople chosen at random as well as staff and parents in the daycare centre, the director of the asylum centre and a number of young people (asylum seekers and local citizens) enrolled in the municipality’s combined youth club and after-school centre, which has served as a joint institution for children and young people from both the asylum centre and the local community for more than 15 years. Like the daycare centre, the after-school club is located in one of the asylum centre buildings, leased from the centre. The two journalists then rushed back to Copenhagen with several hours of interviews and video recordings. The news feature had to be ready for the late television news show the following evening – the night before US election day.

Over the past decades, several anthropologists have paid attention to the ways in which xenophobia is produced and reproduced in the Danish public media debate (e.g. Henkel, 2011; Hervik, 1999; 2011; Jacobsen et al., 2013; Rytter and Pedersen, 2014; Suhr, 2021; see also Borberg, 2021; Danbolt and Myong, 2019; Nielsen, 2019). By way of the very same media platforms, simultaneously a number of anthropologists have sought through public dissemination to qualify and nuance the often negatively framed Danish public discussions concerning refugees and immigrants (for interesting personal accounts on experiences and implications of such media interaction see e.g. Hervik, 2015; Schmidt, 2016; Suhr, 2019; for a Norwegian context see also Eriksen, 2016). Such ‘anthropological engagement’ (Abram and Pink, 2015) in the public sphere and debate was my own intention in agreeing to cooperate with Radio Denmark by sharing my field site with them. But it seems that anthropologists have paid less attention to the potential for media collaboration and public dissemination sometimes to strike right back – like a boomerang – at the very ethnographic research process in which we are engaged. The purpose of this tale from the field is to illuminate and unpack precisely this phenomenon: when a given media collaboration or dissemination generates new empirical situations and local realities that in turn influence or even decisively reshape our ethnographic fields and field sites and hence our pending findings and analyses. When this happens, the tale shows, it simultaneously complicates the general understanding of ‘research’ and ‘public dissemination’ as distinct elements that belong to two separate spheres and stages of the anthropological work process.

In truth, at times the media come to constitute something more than the dissemination partners or collaborators we typically might imagine them to be. As the tale underscores, instead at times they can become actual co-creators of the research process, meaning that the actual media dissemination in its own right proves to empirically generate new local realities ‘back in the field’, turning the media into an actual extension – as it were – of the ethnographic field, rather than a parallel domain. And when public research dissemination translates into unintended ethnographic intervention like this, the supposedly distinct elements of ‘research’ and ‘dissemination’ merge in new and unexpected ways. Whereas anthropologist Didier Fassin (2015) has shed light on precisely this merging and the occasionally uncontainable ramifications of the dissemination of our research findings in public media, in so doing he focuses on ‘the public afterlife’ of ethnography and ethnographic studies (i.e. after scholarly publication). Through this tale from the field, what I wish to turn our attention to is the potential impact of media collaboration on the ongoing ethnographic fieldwork and analysis process.

In this manner, the tale shows how in particular two sets of definitions become blurred: first, where a given research story begins and ends and second, the wider implications of research dissemination for continuing empirical exploration in and of the field. Within and beyond the context of public discussions concerning immigration and integration, which for the past three decades unremittingly has formed one of the most extensively covered socio-political topics in Danish media and public debate (see e.g. Rytter, 2019), whilst recounting what happened when media interest altered the process of ethnographic research, this field tale from Jelling is thus intended to foreground the question of where the unpredictable domino effects of media collaboration leave (or take) us as anthropologists and fieldworkers disseminating in the public sphere. What potentials and challenges does it bring to our work and our discipline when the media become actual co-creators of our ethnographic fields and field sites – and so of our concrete empirical findings and analyses?

An ethnographic case study wedged between Trump and Clinton on US presidential election day

Radio Denmark condensed the hours of recordings and interviews into a four-minute television feature on the everyday neighbourly coexistence between the Jelling asylum centre and local community. The footage was filmed inside the daycare centre and the after-school club, each of which occupied different premises within the asylum centre compound. The feature was aired the night before US election day on the television evening news show at 9 p.m. Danish time, accompanied by a news article on the Radio Denmark website headlined ‘In Jelling, they drop off their children at daycare in the middle of the asylum centre’ (Danish Broadcasting Corporation, 2016; my translation). The television news feature and accompanying online article were launched specifically on that night because from the outset Radio Denmark had planned for ‘the Jelling story’ to then ‘roll over’ (rulle videre) throughout the following day’s schedule – that is, during the day of the US election. This media strategy thus resulted in two live interviews, on Radio Denmark’s radio news programme P1 Morning (P1 Morgen) and the television news programme DR2 Morning (DR2 Morgen), in which I told the story of the everyday ‘institutional neighbourliness’ (Larsen, 2019) between the Jelling asylum centre and the local community, for seven and 5 minutes, respectively. On a US presidential election day, this is quite a lot of airtime on national television and radio – not least considering that the Jelling story was completely unrelated.

Ready to let the undramatic, yet apparently shocking story from Jelling ‘roll over’ in the media, I arrived at the Radio Denmark headquarters early on the morning of election day. Everywhere was seething and bubbling with the US presidential election. I wondered whether this everyday story of non-conflictual neighbourliness between an asylum centre and a local community somewhere in the Danish countryside might not – after all – be a bit misplaced and miscast. But the journalist had assured me that this positive, down-to-earth yet ‘shocking’ story from small-town Jelling was the perfect foil for, hence break from, the high-tensioned world drama of Trump versus Clinton. The purpose of this neatly designed programming for election day, in which my research case was to serve as an intermezzo, was thus to counteract viewer and listener fatigue through a carefully coordinated interaction between ‘event’ and ‘everyday’, the Jelling story doing the latter job.

Sandwiched between parliamentarians, electoral experts and political opinion makers on each side of the live interviews both on P1 Morning (the radio programme) and DR2 Morning (on television), I was given a lot of time to tell the Jelling story down to the smallest ethnographic detail. For example, I spent several minutes explaining in depth how the after-school club’s go-karts had played an important role in the development of the somewhat uncomplicated neighbourly relationship between the asylum centre and the local community in Jelling today. Once upon a time, the children and young people from the asylum centre used to jump the fence into the club’s outdoor play area outside opening hours to try out the exciting go-karts there. Eventually, the two heads of club and centre came up with the idea that the best way to resolve the ongoing problem might be to formally admit the ‘trespassers’ to the club on equal terms with the town’s children and teenagers. Likewise, I explained in great depth and detail how the public skateboard park, also located within the asylum centre area, can be seen as a concretization of this institutional neighbourliness between asylum centre and town – and as a materialization of the everyday pragmatism on which it rests. Once upon a time, the town’s children and young people wished for a skateboard park. The town authorities could only offer the actual plot on which it was subsequently built, but not the resources for materials and establishment – so the Red Cross funded these instead, through the asylum centre. And so it was that in unison the local Red Cross administration and the Jelling municipality turned the public skateboard park within the asylum centre area into a reality – to the benefit of everyone in town, including the residents of the asylum centre.

During the total broadcasting time of 3 hours on the radio on P1 Morning and two-and-a-half on television on DR2 Morning, the comprehensive and ethnographically detailed live interviews about the everyday neighbourliness between asylum centre and local community in a small Danish town were the only two features that did not concern the US presidential election. Never have the words ‘go-karts’ and ‘skateboard park’ seemed so startlingly unexpected as on that global, macro-political November morning on Danish national television and radio back in 2016.

The asylum centre as just another local institution

While the Danish asylum landscape is generally a turbulent one, with new asylum centres continually opening up and closing down, the centre in Jelling has been operating since 1993 and locally its presence no longer constitutes an ‘event’. On the contrary, my study (Larsen, 2019) has demonstrated that the asylum centre has come to tie in with pre-existing local community schemes of institutional mutuality and interconnectedness and in so doing has become a part of local community life to such an extent that in Jelling, in everyday life today, the asylum centre has come to be commonly perceived as ‘just another local institution’ (Larsen, 2019) in line with other local institutions like the public school, the teacher training college, the care home for the elderly and the sports club. Indeed, this institutional interconnectedness makes it difficult, if not futile, to try to ascertain who in Jelling has become ‘integrated’ into what. Is it the asylum centre that over time has been integrated into the local community? Or is it the local community that has gradually been integrated into the asylum centre and the asylum centre area?

For the past decades, the societal incorporation of immigrants and refugees has consistently been a topic of increasingly heated discussion in Danish public debate. Researchers, politicians and members of the public alike are preoccupied by questions about this group’s participation and so-called ‘integration’ in society. These questions are often tinged by a certain problematizing tone whereby immigrants and refugees are implicitly juxtaposed with ‘Danish culture’ and ‘Danish values’, generating a fundamental categorical divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Hervik, 2011; Jensen, 2008; Olwig and Paerregaard, 2011; Rytter 2010). Over the last two decades, however, anthropologists and social researchers have criticized the concept of ‘integration’ for its unclear use in both policy and research contexts in Denmark (Ejrnæs, 2002; Jöhncke, 2011). It has also been pointed out that the ambiguity in the political applications of ‘integration’ has sometimes been transferred to its applications in research as well by way of not problematizing the term itself or trying to define it explicitly (Ejrnæs, 2002; Rytter, 2019). This is obviously problematic in academic research, where precise usage of concepts is crucial – and where ‘ultimately, uncritical use of the concept of “integration” in academic writings may re-enforce and even widen the asymmetrical power structures that it was intended to describe, analyse and understand in the first place’ (Rytter, 2019: 678f.).

As Danish anthropologists have frequently pointed out (e.g. Jöhncke, 2011; Olwig and Paerregaard, 2011), within the Danish mainstream public understanding, ‘integration’ is usually about a particular part (‘refugees’/‘immigrants’) having to become immersed in a pre-existing whole (‘Danish society’). The spatial, social and institutional intertwining of asylum centre and local community that one sees in the case of Jelling thus renders it pointless to think in terms of ‘integration’ as it no longer makes sense to talk about what is the part and what is the whole. If the asylum centre were to be removed, the local community’s own institutions and specifically the daycare centre and the after-school club would be affected – and vice versa. Thus, as I have suggested elsewhere (Larsen, 2019: 80): ‘[W]hat the field site of Jelling and its asylum centre area brings to attention is rather a “holon” (Koestler, 1967: 48), that is, something that is simultaneously a whole and a part.’ Put differently, it is like a card house, where each part is supported by the whole structure, while itself decisively helping to support the whole.

To summarize the analytical elaboration I have given elsewhere (Larsen, 2019), the point is that in Jelling the everyday institutional intertwining of ‘asylum centre’ and ‘local community’ did not grow from an ideological focus locally on ‘integration’ or any otherwise purposive, ideologically intended project of ‘proximity by design’ (Fortier, 2010) or ‘planning for pluralism’ (Gressgaard and Jensen, 2016). Rather, it grew from a somewhat pragmatic focus on local solutions to local challenges. For instance, as when the town found itself short of space for a local daycare centre at a time when space was available in one of the asylum centre’s vacant buildings; when the two heads of the asylum centre and the after-school club resolved the ongoing ‘go-karts conflict’ by formally deciding together to include the children and young people of the asylum centre into the club and when the local municipality of Jelling and the local Red Cross administration joined forces to turn a long-anticipated town skateboard park into a reality.

In other words, what in particular the study has revealed is how the so-called ‘integration’ of immigrants and refugees into Danish society locally can take shape based on a pragmatic reasoning that is utterly different from the typically normative and ideological reasoning that characterizes the Danish public and political debate on immigration and asylum at the national level (e.g. Larsen, 2011; 2018a; 2018b; Olwig et al., 2012; Rytter, 2010). As the study showed (Larsen, 2019), in Jelling the institutional intertwining of ‘asylum centre’ and ‘local community’ took shape based on the very same everyday approach – pragmatic neighbourliness and solution-orientated focus – that characterizes the cooperative relations between other local institutions in town in addition to the asylum centre. Thus, the various local institutions in Jelling (including the asylum centre) together form an overall institutional interconnectedness and mutuality, on the strength of which they jointly contribute to the maintenance of a viable local community and village life.

As described elsewhere in conjunction with colleagues in the context of a previous, collective ethnographic study of the everyday interplay between local communities and asylum centres in rural Denmark (Larsen et al., 2015; Whyte et al., 2018, 2019), it is precisely through the above-pictured emphasis on an inclusive local and pragmatic ‘us’ (as opposed to an exclusive national and ideological ‘us’ contrasting with ‘them’) that asylum centres in smaller towns and villages in Danish rural areas and peripheral districts have not infrequently to varying degrees become socially and economically incorporated into existing local frameworks of institutional interdependency and mutuality. As colleagues and I have been arguing: ‘[L]ocal reactions and approaches to asylum centres do not begin with their establishment; rather locals engage with asylum centres through ongoing relations of mutuality developed within a pre-existing field of local challenges and opportunities’ (Whyte et al., 2019: 1955). However, because the Danish asylum landscape, as mentioned, is generally a turbulent one, with new asylum centres constantly opening up and closing down, the wider progress of such an incorporation into local structures of institutional interconnectedness tends to be held back by the typically short lifespan of the institution.

A striking exception to this is precisely what we find in Jelling, where the asylum centre in the middle of town has been in operation for more than 25 years, allowing for today’s distinctive institutional entanglement between ‘asylum centre’ and ‘local community’ to follow its course of development. In fact, this course of development may even have reached a certain point in Jelling today where the particular institutional entanglement in question perhaps no longer can be brought to an end. For example, while the children and young people from the asylum centre were being so-called integrated into the municipal after-school club, the club had already been an institution integrated into the asylum centre in the first place, by virtue of its longtime operation on the asylum centre premises in two buildings leased from the centre. As I have expressed it elsewhere, in Jelling the institutions of the asylum centre and the local community have merged into ‘a complex web of ownership that can no longer be disentangled, as they are in a series of almost “archeological” layers of belonging across local space and time’ (Larsen, 2019: 80). The following particulars may serve to underpin further the above line of reasoning: During the beginning of fieldwork in spring 2016, there were 98 asylum centres in operation in Denmark (all accommodation centres, with the exception of one reception centre and a couple of departure centres). About one-third of those accommodation centres were ran by the Danish Red Cross, while the remaining two-thirds were ran by rural municipal contractors. Today, beginning of 2021, there are in total 12 Danish asylum centres in operation, counting as few as eight accommodation centres: seven managed by municipal rural contractors and one managed by the Danish Red Cross. That latter remaining one is the centre in Jelling.

‘If you want to find out about integration, you’ve come to the wrong place’

Back on US election day, on 8 November 2016, on national radio and on national television, both journalists asked me at the end of the live interviews: ‘So what can we learn from this research study in Jelling with regard to integration elsewhere in Denmark?’ I answered them (and have answered many times since then) that the point is that in Jelling the everyday institutional neighbourliness between asylum centre and local community was never perceived, talked about or experienced locally as ‘integration’ – and therefore that what perhaps we can learn from it is precisely that integration may never be successful (however one might define that) until we cease from naming it and focusing on it as ‘integration’.

In Jelling, that is the way it is. Here, where the asylum centre has been operating in the middle of town since 1993, when a large group of Bosnian refugee families came to Denmark, hardly anyone talks about the everyday institutional neighbourliness and interconnectedness with the asylum centre as a case of successful ‘integration’. In fact, during fieldwork it happened quite often that local people independently expressed their concern that as an anthropologist I would just ‘be wasting my time’ having chosen their community as my field site. In Jelling, they assured me, I would find absolutely nothing ‘exciting’ to study or write about concerning the asylum centre. As one interlocutor put it:

So, really, if you want to know about integration and stuff like that, you have come to the wrong place – because really, I mean, there is no problem or conflict here at all, when it comes to the neighbourly relationship with the asylum centre. In fact, you might just waste your time here – you will not find anything thrilling on this here in Jelling. You would be able to find much more on this issue elsewhere, where perhaps the everyday relation with a local asylum centre is more conflictual (quoted in Larsen, 2019: 84).

Seen from the local perspective, the amenable everyday neighbourly relationship with the asylum centre and its residents had nothing to do with ‘integration and stuff like that’, as the above interlocutor expressed it. Although it is a word I never used myself in the field to describe my research interest on everyday coexistence between asylum centres and local communities in Denmark, ‘integration’ quickly proved to be the immediate association among local residents. Moreover, it was clear that they directly associated ‘integration’ with ‘conflict’ – two themes often closely linked in Danish public media debate (Jacobsen et al., 2013; about the general use of conflict angled news stories as journalistic strategy in Danish media see also Ingemann, 2021). Therefore, from the point of view of my interlocutors, wanting to find out about ‘integration’ (as they named my research interest) seemed to be a poor match with a specific local neighbourhood scenario characterized by ‘non-conflict’. Many local people worried that I would be disappointed along the way. With the best of intentions, they recommended me to study everyday interactions between local communities and asylum centres elsewhere, where perhaps ‘some conflict’ might exist for me to examine. On one occasion, this attitude to my ongoing research in town was hilariously reflected in a headline written by a journalist from a local newspaper after interviewing me for a short news article about my fieldwork in Jelling. The headline simply said: ‘Anthropologist studies non-problem’ (Linnebjerg, 2018, my translation).

Thus in the company of local residents, I repeatedly found myself having to emphasize that as an ethnographic researcher in migration and Danish local communities I really did consider Jelling as worthy of study. Approaching ‘integration’ (i.e. my interlocutors’ wording) from within a local context that was not characterized by ‘conflict’, I explained, could in fact contribute to increased awareness in Danish society of what precisely there should be more of, rather than less of (the latter forming a characteristic angle in much Danish public and political debate on immigrant and refugee inclusion). Local residents seemed satisfied with this explanation, but in general they still seemed to find the local community’s neighbourly relationship with the asylum centre a bit hyped on the ethnographer’s side. Because, as local people generally explained to me, in everyday life they did not think about there being an asylum centre in the midst of town. Its residents were ‘just part of local street life, just like everyone else’.

When media coverage transforms local realities in the field

In Jelling, the asylum centre had become ‘just another local institution’ (Larsen, 2019), to the extent that generally it did not occur to local citizens that the everyday neighbourliness between asylum centre and local community could be anything special, worth studying or having long conversations about. Well, in Jelling one did not feel special, that is, until the Radio Denmark news story on Monday, 7 November, the night before the US election of 2016.

The ‘shocking’ headline – ‘In Jelling, they drop off their children at daycare in the middle of the asylum centre’ – on the US election day won the online news article more than 240,000 views on Facebook (corresponding to about 5% of the adult population of Denmark). The brief summary of the video feature from the television news show the night before, which Radio Denmark shared on Facebook together with the online news article, drew similar attention. All over Denmark, in other words, the news story of the local daycare centre in the middle of an asylum centre went viral. In fact, despite this being US election day, this became the most-read online news story of the day on the Radio Denmark website. The vast majority of those comments that I managed to follow were discussing the Jelling case in positive terms. From all corners of the country, readers saw the Jelling news story as a much-needed and most welcome success story on integration. Before long, a number of citizens from Jelling also came forward to proudly confirm the story in the comments, sharing the news story further from there onto Jelling’s own local community internet fora. It felt good to have pierced through ‘the media’ with a qualifying, nuancing and – I believe – encouraging contribution to the so-called Danish public ‘integration debate’. All was well.

A few weeks later, however, when I returned to the field, something had changed. I was now generally being greeted by local inhabitants who ‘could very well understand’ why I had exactly come to Jelling ‘to look into integration’. Because, as they now told me: ‘We are just so good at that [integration] here in Jelling – in fact so good that Radio Denmark recently ran a news feature about us and our neighbourly relationship with the asylum centre.’ On the point of starting a qualitative interview with local residents I had not already met, I found the same novel reaction: after briefing them in more detail about my research focus, the interviewees several times independently referred back to the Radio Denmark news story. As one interlocutor expressed it, before becoming aware of the connection between the news story and my pending study:

If it’s the everyday neighbourly relation with the asylum centre here in town that you want to find out about, then I would just like to start by recommending that you search the internet for a particular news feature that Radio Denmark produced about us here in Jelling a few weeks ago, concerning just that. I suggest that you just quickly watch that, before we get started – then you will have some background. Because that news feature... I mean, it just says everything about who we are here in Jelling – and about our way of integrating [the asylum seekers]. And it says it much more precisely than I would ever be able to myself here during the next hour and a half interview.

Put differently, my field site was no longer the same. The local people’s particular way of talking about (or rather, not talking about) their community had changed. The local self-understanding of the everyday neighbourliness between town and asylum centre had transformed from being ‘nothing special’ to being ‘something special indeed’. My field site, as I had come to know it, had altered. My dissemination collaboration with ‘the media’, based on an analysis of Jelling as a local community hosting an asylum centre, which was at the time still in progress, had now reshaped the very same local community’s self-understanding and self-presentation, at least with respect to ‘integration and stuff like that’. A consequence of this today is that as I continue to work on processing the collected fieldwork material in its entirety, every so often in my analyses I find myself having to operate with an actual ‘before’ and ‘after’ the Radio Denmark news feature.

The media as ethnographic disturbance and boomerang

Interaction and collaboration with ‘the media’ – as shown – can interfere against our intentions with our ethnographic studies and empirical analyses (for breathtaking exemplifications of this see Fassin, 2013, 2015; McDonald, 1987). This may not least be the case for those of us researching heated topics in political debate, such as ‘immigration’ and ‘integration’ (see e.g. Hervik, 2015; Schmidt, 2016). As this ethnographic research tale from Jelling has illuminated and unpacked, our media collaborations may even come to constitute a sort of ‘third leg’ in the research process, meaning that, within a given study, as our empirical findings develop, in a circular motion these can in and of themselves very concretely be partly shaped by our very own public dissemination (of these our findings). This raises at least three central questions. First, what possibilities and challenges does it bring to our ethnographic work, if we understand ‘the media’ at times in this way as actual co-creators of our empirical research – rather than just a parallel collaborator and separate working platform from which we can disseminate our complete or – as in my case – tentative research findings to the public, including our interlocutors. Second, as also touched on in the beginning of the tale, how does this differ as a phenomenon from existing discussions about the occasionally uncontrollable paths, whereabouts and (mis)uses of our research findings after scholarly publication – hence, in ‘the public afterlife of ethnography’ to use the wording of Fassin (2015). Finally yet importantly, how also does it differ as a phenomenon from the already well-established discussion in ethnography about the unforeseen consequences that now and again occur ‘when they read what we write’ (Brettell, 1993), ‘they’ referring to our interlocutors.

As emphasized by Brettell’s work, from time to time ‘the media’ will be biased in their broadcasting of our studies. Our ethnographic findings may be misrepresented in such a way as to end up making our interlocutors angry or hurt when they hear or read the media’s interpretation of what we have said about them. This can lead to broken access and trust among our interlocutors. But this tale from the field has not described a dissemination scenario in which ‘the media’ is misrepresenting an ethnographic finding and by so doing harming people and relationships in the field. On the contrary, this research tale has presented a situation in which the local community under study recognized itself in the media’s positively angled presentation of it. At the same time, though, this recognition and embracement of a view of themselves from the outside inadvertently led to an altered local community self-understanding – and the media coverage of the research site hence hit right back into the field, like an ethnographic boomerang. Far from being the ‘betrayers’ of an existing finding, ‘the media’ thus instead became co-creators of a new and divergent finding. In other words, the result was a complete reversal of the twisting by the media of an existing finding as described by Brettell (1993), which was however just as ‘disturbing’ to the ethnographic process. This way, this research tale relates an ethnographic disturbance whose implications I offer other anthropologists the opportunity to reflect upon in relation to their own work. In addition, and in a broader sense, I have wished ethnographically to unpack and exemplify the task of undertaking anthropological fieldwork and research in the context of a contemporary news media world that is legitimized by the number of viewers, listeners, ‘clickers’ and ‘sharers’ or what has also been phrased ‘the attention economy in the media market’ (Hendricks, 2021, my translation). In the global information society of the present day, our research stories, like everything else, are carefully picked to the media platforms’ own benefit – but sometimes, perhaps, also to the benefit of ethnography, and the dynamic and uncontainable practice that, in truth, it always was.