ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the symbolic resource of the local community as a moral source is constituted by narratives, events and processes in data and how they, like oscillating meanings, have formed the mesh constituting this symbolic resource. Integration workers and street-level workers, who operate in a market of projects and sparse funding opportunities, use volunteering and community-rebuilding as a way to appeal to immigrants’ and refugees’ own morality. Community and place are social spaces considered to be moral spaces, where each individual immigrant is to be reconstructed and transformed through relations – typically with the help of leaders and pioneers as spearheads, of a sort, of the problematised neighbourhood. The idea is to institute someone in the community who can claim to speak on behalf of the community and thus be the one reactivating and mobilising moral values that were hidden.
