Narrativizing the self: how do the migrant experiences matter for joint belongingness?

ABSTRACT The fundamental principles of integration are increasingly criticized while indicator-informed-integration (III) remains an aspiration for policymakers. In contrast, we argue that integration and in particular its social variant cannot be measured through indicators. It is even a fallacy to qualify one’s integration journey through indicators. Instead, migrant integration is an everyday phenomenon that relates to the course of one’s life in their new home country. We propose that we need to understand the narratives that this process involves and the intimacies and convivial experiences that it generates. Our main argument is that migration or integration research should pay more attention to the foundations of social interactions covering their essence, processes, and nature that make the migrant and established communities communicate with each other. The data for this article originate from an EU-funded multi-national research project looking into joint belongingness and migration including young people.


Introduction
Integration of migrants matters, but we hardly understand what integration entails.Neither policymakers nor integration scholars pay much attention to how the public, involving the established societies and the migrants, experience integration.The fundamental principles of integration are increasingly criticized (Dahinden 2016;Schinkel 2018Schinkel , 2013;;Favell 2019) while indicator-induced-integration (III) remains an aspiration for policymakers.In contrast, we argue that integration and in particular its social variant cannot be measured through indicators.It is even a fallacy to qualify one's integration journey through indicators.Instead, migrant integration is an everyday phenomenon that relates to the course of one's life in their new home country (Cederberg 2014).We propose that we need to understand the narratives that this process involves, the intimacies that it generates and its impacts on the emergence of respective convivial experiences.To this extent, we propose that for self-narratives to evolve into social intimacies so that they can become bases for conviviality, setting up interactions between the migrant and the wider society is crucial.Providing them both with equal access rights to services such as education, healthcare, and housing as well as employment are notably important insomuch as they are mentioned in the III literature (Alba and Foner 2016;Ager and Strang 2004, 2008, 2010).
However, we are interested in developing a conceptual condition to understand first how one's expectations from socially intimate relationships are fulfilled with the reception of their self-narratives by the other and second how this affects joint belongingness.In order, we look at the most mundane situations and take volunteering as an act to harness social interactions in those situations while we also recognize that there could simply be similar other mechanisms such as sports or arts (Gibbs and Block 2017;Zembylas 2014).In this article, we will emphasize the importance of bolstering parochial spaces as sites where meaningful contacts in small localities facilitate the expression of diverse narratives that can bring forth "inclusive" environments.These environments are also the spaces whereby diversity does not matterthat no diverse identity sticks out in the crowd.To achieve this, below, we will concentrate on spelling out how one's expectations from socially intimate relationships are fulfilled with the reception of their self-narratives by the other.To this extent shared interests matter.
Therefore, we reflect on how joint narratives emerge between migrants and wider society based on the social intimacies that they develop as they start to share interests.We also endorse those critics, who question the relevance of integration to migrants, that is, whether migrants should care to be integrated or not.This line of criticism departs from a hierarchy assumption embedded in integration research (Meissner and Heil 2020;Ndhlovu 2016) and argues that integration can resemble a neo-colonial imposition or nation-state construction demanding from the migrant as the "other" to assimilate with the majority that represents the wider society.However, insomuch as the expectation that migrants should integrate may appear fallacious, still the opponents of integration do not clarify the nature of the journey that migrants go through despite denouncing integration (Schinkel 2018).To compensate for what is lacking in those arguments that endorse integration through indicators (III) and others that oppose the term integration, we propose that the essence of interactions that emerge between the migrants and wider society matters to foster subsequent joint narratives among them.We note that the most recent UK Home Office indicators of integration framework (2019) refers to social connections.However, neither the essence of these connections is defined, nor they receive enough attention in this framework.Within a 60-page long policy paper, in fact, "interaction" features only twice and not fully substantiated.
In this effort, our article evaluates how narratives and social intimacies built around shared interests paving the way to convivial experiences emerge using primary data collected in a European Commission-funded research project between 2018 and 2020 in 7 European countries [thereafter anonymized project].We concentrate on interpersonal relationships that appear between the migrants and the established communities as individuals seek out interest similarities with each other.Hereby, our contribution to migration studies and particularly to social inclusion research is as follows.Having recognized in existing research the importance that interactions between migrants and established communities have received, we note that their essence, forms, and how people interact have thus far received limited interest.To fill in this gap, we elaborate on the primary encounter between migrants as migrants and established societies.This encounter takes place through their expressing their self-narratives to each other in everyday situations.Along with their verbal component, self-narratives can also relate to how we carry and present ourselves to a wider society in our places of living with our clothing, food, and entertainment.Inevitably, our presence in parochial places (Hunter 1985) where likeminded people gather leads to a certain form of interaction with others that generate intimacies and convivial (Gilroy 2005) experiences.Thus, to underline the contribution of our study to the "convivial turn" in migration and diversity studies (Gidley 2013;Neal et al. 2013) as well, we look closely at the drivers of social interactions and suggest that they can be traced via self-narratives.We develop joint belongingness as essential character of social inclusion.
We argue that insomuch as people can foster common interest alignments that originate from not only sharing experiences but also interact in their shared spaces, this would pave the way towards more inclusive societies.Afterwards, social intimacies would ensue originating from the experienced conviviality.This goes beyond questioning whether or when someone is integrated or not, but states that once people reflect on their commonalities with each other regardless of their backgrounds and narrate themselves to each other amidst such commonalities, they would then build joint narratives and belongingness to each other.We will present how our conceptual proposals are manifested in personal relations as we present our empirical study below.As the self interacts with the other socially and inclusively, joint narratives formed by shared interests and experiences come about.There onwards, we can follow how social interactions and conviviality evolve mutually.
In order the first section of this article, we will briefly look into social interaction and conviviality literatures to delineate environments in which such interactions occur.In the same section, we will also reflect on the essence of interactions as a term noting that it has not received due attention thus far in the existing academic literature.We foreground how our joint-belongingness-oriented approach can fill the gap within both social interaction and conviviality literatures when it comes to discussing social inclusion.In order, we look at people's interaction in parochial spaces so that we can inform the terms of debate within integration studies as we reflect on them in the second section.The methodology section of the article provides a detailed explanation of our empirical data including the countries from which our data comes and the profiles of our research participants.Thereafter, we will interpret the empirics of our research under the light of the conceptualization provided in earlier chapters.To justify our argument using the empirical data, we will first look at how interactions and social intimacies come about.Second, we will look at the essence of interpersonal relationships and intimacies through volunteers' self-narratives.Third, we will examine how interpersonal relations and intimacies induced by self-narratives transform self-narratives into joint narratives.The last subsection of our empirics will look at how joint narratives affects conviviality and the sense of belonging.The conclusion reflects on the findings of our article.

Social interactions and conviviality
Social interactions in diverse settings harness conviviality and "multiculture" (Gilroy 2004;Wessendorf 2014;Wise and Velayutham 2014).Despite the broader political retreat in Europe from ideals of multiculturalism (Lentin and Titley 2011;McGhee 2008), there has still been a growth in the sociological literature documenting everyday diversity, often defined as "multiculture.""Everyday multiculturalism" has been defined as "a grounded approach to look at the everyday practice and lived experience of diversity in specific situations and spaces of encounter" (Wise and Velayutham 2009, 3).The majority of everyday multiculturalism and conviviality literatures focus on superdiverse urban contexts.Stevan Vertovec (2021) underlines superdiversity as a "summary term" to address the need for a move away from a focus on ethnicity or national identity paradigms, but to consider an increasingly diverse set of identities (Vertovec 2007(Vertovec , 1025(Vertovec -1026(Vertovec , 2010)).In a nutshell, superdiversity is how difference is used and negotiated by social actors in contact and interaction with each other in everyday encounters (Semi et al. 2009, 69).One can also list a series of terms to underline how people in diverse settings "get together" and intermingle with each other as follows "prosaic multiculture" (Amin 2002), "throwntogetherness of place" (Massey 2005), "everyday cosmopolitanism" (Noble 2009), "commonplace diversity" (Wessendorf 2013), "mundane multiculturalism" (Watson and Saha 2013), "domestic cosmopolitanism" (Mica 2006) and "everyday multiculturalism" (Wise and Velayutham 2009).
Diverging from these set of terms, throughout our article, we operationalize conviviality to capture the quotidian routines of multiculture across a diverse set of European cities (Gilroy 2004;anonymized project).Yet, there is a much-criticized element in Gilroy's argument that it suggests production and reproduction of racialized minority identities accompanied with ideological attributions assigning inferiority to some vis-à-vis European white normativity.Therefore, others have expanded the scope of conviviality beyond its mere race and racial difference connotations but looked at individuals' capacity to live together (Wise and Noble 2016).Yet, for some even this sounds broad and abstract.Smith (2015) has attempted to affirm conviviality as a term to suggest that everyday inter-ethnic interactions and cultural formations are an unspectacular, extra-governmental aspect of today's urban experiences.Yet, they are still spontaneous and organic (Gilroy 2005, 124) as they normalize diversity and make it commonplace (Wessendorf 2014).
Daily encounters facilitate conviviality.However, most of them remain fleeting and interactions without any deeper contact between people such as eye contact, nodding, smiling, or even small talks at a bus stop, parks, libraries or shops (Lapina 2016;Peterson 2017;Wessendorf and Farrer 2021).According to Wise and Noble (2016), such interactions essentialize conviviality to merely refer to fleeting encounters suggesting a symbiotic interrelationship between these latter two terms.This interrelationship may sound to romanticize the "potential of everyday encounters to produce social transformations" and "allow the knotty issue of inequalities to slip out of debate and neglect historical and material conditions and power" (Valentine 2008).In reality, proximity and even mutual knowledge may not neither lead to (meaningful) contacts and ensue positive attitudes nor respect among groups (Amin 2002;Skey 2013;Valentine 2008;Wessendorf 2014).In other words, it is not certain where fleeting encounters would lead to as they could either bring forth positive attitudes or reproduce existing prejudices.
It is in parochial spaces where all encounters become much deeper and more meaningful (Asor 2020;Wessendorf and Farrer 2021;Wessendorf 2014) and become meaningful interactions.While the public realm is the world of streets where one meets strangers (Hunter 1985) and fleeting encounters characterize their interactions, parochial realm is composed of communal relations among neighbors, colleagues in workplace or acquaintances via associations and informal networks.In parochial spaces, people interact with each other more regularly and at times around common goals or even interests (Wessendorf 2014;Amin 2002).Integration studies thus far haves not closely studied parochial spaces to understand how migrants and wider society interact in such places.Our article fills in this gap by exploring what makes people interact in parochial spaces and how their interaction can inform the terms of debate within integration studies.These are the two underlying questions of our article as well.While social integration research and policies directly or indirectly focus on interactions between migrant and established society members, it is not too clear what drives such interactions.We argue that people would seek first likeminded others and second spaces to match their self-narratives with others and fulfill them.Their quest also nudges people to others regardless of how diverse their context is.This means superdiversity by itself would be rather tepid and narrow, unless it leads to meaningful contacts (Table 1).
Parochial realms do not have to be physical spaces either (Hunter 1985) but made up of activities and experiences.In our empirical analysis, volunteering will resonate as an umbrella experience that bonds young volunteers with each other regardless of the spatial boundaries of their volunteering as a practice.In essence, volunteering involves two main factors of a parochial realm, that is, regularity and absorbing a common goal/interest.Furthermore, interactions that come about via volunteering have provided conviviality to volunteers harnessed by their superdiverse backgrounds.
A desire to find likeminded individuals was the first intention of volunteers under study when they applied to [the anonymized project] in 2018.Their volunteering journey informs the empirical part of our article.Seeking for a fulfillment of their self-narratives and realizing opportunities with likeminded others lured them into volunteering.Their most tangible incentive was to experience new cultures, meet some others whom they would not otherwise have met in their everyday mundane situations or even try new cuisinesall guided by their self-narratives.Hence, as they managed to find spacenot necessarily physical, and people, they started to build more meaningful contacts with those likeminded others.We trace how they harnessed their contacts through elaborating on the realms that they entered facilitated by their shared interests.The volunteers that engaged in our project have defined their relationships with other participants as "friendship" or even "family," making us assess their feelings toward the other as "intimate" relationships.We will follow the evolution of their contacts for the rest of our article.

Social integration vs social interactions
This article concentrates on social integration.By its nature, social integration cannot be discussed without mentioning social interactions.In fact, social integration depends on the very nature of interactions (Phillimore 2012;Grzymala-Kazlowska 2016).Joint narratives are outcomes of social interactions, and to understand how they come about we first explore their origin as self-narratives.Thereby, we propose social interactions as a more accurate term to qualify the journey that both the established communities and migrants embark upon once the latter becomes part of the circumstances of the former in parochial spaces.A meeting between respective self-narratives informs interactions that subsequently transform both the migrants and established society members.This means that while the migrants and the members of established societies have selfnarratives divergent from each other in the beginning, as they pursue their shared interests in parochial spaces, they eventually develop joint narratives and harness conviviality throughout what become meaningful interactions.This is our contribution to integration research and its social aspect.
To illustrate where our argument originates from, we should still summarize the current integration research.Integration delineates a society as a whole and demands its constitutive members to adjust themselves to the rest of this whole.However, societies neither function as a whole nor migrants can adjust to the rest so swiftly.Still, the discussion on immigrant integration remains what it should contain (Klarenbeek 2019).What is inherent to integration theories is the assumption that immigrants become part of a whole.Unless we leave this assumption fully behind, we cannot propose a new interpretation of integration either.Main critiques on immigrant integration (Anderson 2013;De Genova 2010;Dahinden 2016) raise that its assumptions conceive hierarchies between the established communities and the migrants.These critiques show that nation states are seeking to establish hierarchies between the immigrant and the established communities almost replicating the hierarchies that they generated between the self and the other at their inception.This may even allude to a neo-colonial relationship.Some scholars also criticized migration and integration research for being under the influence of nation-state and ethnicity-centered epistemologies (Thranhardt and Bommes 2010).Integration may indeed present the established societies in a superior position, and any research that takes this as given runs the risk of taking migration-related difference as naturally given and insurmountable.Considering established society as a superior group resembles the hierarchical relationship that the new nation-states cultivated in their relationship with the "other."That is why an integration approach vying to make the migrant part of a whole misses the point that there will always remain a hierarchy in this process as long as it is the nation state that defines what composes the whole.Without a nation-state, in fact there would be no migration and integration discussion (Dahinden 2016, 2).
There is a misperception within the integration research that it pursues a type of "deindividualized individualization" (Schinkel 2017, 30).This concerns the paradoxical ways in which immigrants are both conceived first as individuals, who can be more or less integrated, while later monitored amidst "integration of an immigrant as a category as a whole."This means even when a migrant is well-integrated individually, they may still be a part of the statistics showing that "the majority of migrant category X" has an integration problem.This is an outcome of policies and approaches guided by "civic integrationism" (see e.g.Lentin and Titley 2011) that locates the responsibility for integration with the migrant and portrays "the national society" as a harmonious whole as if without any integration problems.
These debates foreground why we instead propose social interaction as the main catalyst for the migrant to become socially intimate with the members of established communities.Self-narratives play a crucial role affecting social interaction processes by paving the way for similar interests to develop between people who would otherwise be foreign to each other.To cater for what makes a fully integrated society unachievable, we need to debate the importance of bolstering parochial spaces whereby convivial experiences in small localities facilitate the making and expression of self-narratives.This can provide "inclusive" environments' making the forthcoming social interactions meaningful.In our research project as well [anonymized], we have detected what it means to be included in the wider society for migrants through exploring their self-narratives.Therefore, our argument impinges on the need for integration research to focus on what qualifies social interactions and related intimacies.The following quotation from an interview with a refugee in [anonymized] is telling.
When you heard integration, it is, "Why aren't you integrating into our society, the [anoymised] society?"Sometimes, the interpretation is, you need to change your values, your culture, which is hard.That's why people, they prefer to stay home, and to be isolated, because they are scared if they go there with a different colour, a different value, they might not get a welcome.[…] It's a hierarchy.Integration became a hierarchy.You need to change lots of stuff in order to be here […] Because it's not only one way.There is a two-way responsibility.(UK1) It appears in the quotation above that when migrants enter into an interaction with the established communities, they expect a level of recognition of their stories and their preexisting narratives that generate these stories.People seek intimate relationships primarily through first narrating themselves to themselves before reaching out to the "other." Our understanding of self-narrative originates from Bruner (2002) as he states "narratives [as] are our obligatory medium for expressing ourselves to others" (Bruner 2002, 89).Everyone is born into a narrative-oriented environment.People make sense of their world and position themselves in it through stories (Hammack 2011;McAdams 1996).Bruner claims that "narratives are our obligatory medium for expressing ourselves to others" (Bruner 2002, 89).Our lives consist of many different narratives.People generate their own narratives from the range of "possible" lives and life-styles available to them (Bruner 2004, 694).In other words, we are creating our own self-narratives departing from existing "narrative templates" (Stapleton and Wilson 2017) provided to us by our families and society.Every person creates their narratives by harmonizing their cultural codes with their personal experiences.There are not only one or two self-narratives in our lives, but also an extensive number of experiences that make our self-narratives manifest.For instance, when someone identifies themselves as a person who likes to try foods from different cultures, that person would also set a self-narrative about themselves as someone who likes to try different cuisines.Thus, we consider each answer to the who am I? question as a means to construct our self-narrative.Thereafter, people reflect on their self-narratives to seek intimate relationships with others.Most common way to build an intimate relationship is finding similar "interests" with others whilst constructing our self-narratives.
To understand how intimacy is built by sharing interests with others, we looked at the self-narratives of young migrants when they meet each other as members of their established society through volunteering.By engaging themselves in mundane acts, we came across that they first narrated themselves to another and second pursued interactions.This brings us to conceptualize self-narration and social intimacies as aspects of building socially inclusive societies.We propose this as an alternative to social integration research, but also suggest that those studies that denounce integration at the outset do not pay sufficient attention to how socially inclusive societies are built either.In order, we turn to findings from [anonymized] project centered around migration, social interaction, volunteering.The [anonymized] project explored how young people with migrant and non-migrant backgrounds expressed their self-narratives, and how this expression transformed their own deliberations of their self-identities and the very narratives that derive from these self-identities as forthcoming joint narratives.

Methodology
The data for this article originates from a European Union-funded project entitled [anonymized].The project ran between 2018 and 2021 in 7 countries under its focus.We turn to data from 6 countries including the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia as the data from Malta was insufficient.The countries were selected as the first four are traditional migrant destination countries and the latter two are new destinations for migrant.Furthermore, Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia are also transit countries.The [anonymized] project concentrated on social interactions as a maker of joint belongingness particularly between migrants (M) and non-migrants (NM).We explored social interactions that come about in mundane situations such as volunteering in effect to how they generate similar interests and inclusive environments.We must note that similar interests can range from having leisure activities (in sports or art) to shared experiences through cultural activities or trying new cuisines.Below, we organize the data that we gathered around first the founding of interpersonal relationships, second the transformation of self-narratives to joint narratives, and finally the evolution of sense of belonging and conviviality.We came across the first in all our 6 contexts while the second came out in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, South Tyrol particularly Bolzano, the UK including Glasgow, and finally Ljubljana in Slovenia.Finally, we saw the third in data from Vienna and UK.Hence, our conceptual categories and operationalization of the emergence of joint narratives and social intimacies are inductively guided (Table 2).
Our analysis rests on interviews with three young people in Scotland/Glasgow (UK), four in the Netherlands/Rotterdam (NL), five each in Slovenia/Ljubljana (SL) and Croatia/Zagreb (HR), six in Austria/Vienna (AT) and seven in South Tyrol/Italy (ST).The interviews lasted an hour to hour-and-a-half on average and conducted by project partners face to face.The biggest chunk dealt with respondents' life histories and experiences, including detailed questions on how they consider integration and their feelings of inclusion in places where they live.These interviews were recorded and transcribed.Their age ranges from 18 to 27, and they are mixed in terms of their gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual preference.Ten of these respondents have lived at where they were born for more than 20 years, while 6 lived in their current place of residence for less than two years.Seventeen were non-migrants, and 13 were migrants.Among the experiences of these young people, we explored how they had interacted with each other, and how they gave an account of their experiences as narratives of their interests, identities, and belonging.In a nutshell, we were interested in exploring the experiences that they gathered through meaningful interactions.It looked as if the experiences that they gained through volunteering have increased their feelings of inclusion when they were with other people and their overall sense of belonging to their communities.It also helped them to develop close bonds with the wider society [anonymized source].Below, we present our data and empirical discussion.

How do interactions and social intimacies come about?
Self-narratives matter to affect how people engage with the other in everyday relationships.We take volunteering as a mundane act that affects the course of such relationships.Whilst individuals that consider themselves socially active already tend to be engaged in activities with others, shy participants or those with difficulties to interact with strangers may also instigate social interaction and new friendships through looking for shared interests.When individuals gathered around a common interest, the bonds that they create become long-term or even intimate relationships with each other.24 of the 30 participants in our research hence expressed that their new connections with each other would persist over time beyond the timeline of the [anonymized] project.Nineteen out of 23 participants indicated that they had 3 or more persons with whom they could discuss intimate and personal matters.Having similar interests to develop potential intimate relationships came about as below.
The [anonymised] project is a bit of a family and I have found people who are like me.When I think of any group of volunteers, be it in Zagreb, participant x 1 or participant x, I always find people who are quite similar to myself.They have a bit of the same way of facing things, the same point of view (ST3). 2   We can also see that even if people knew each other before they volunteered, they have become even closer as they came across having similar narratives to affect their environments and relationships.I met x [there].I knew them before, when we arrived in Italy you know, we arrived on the same day.But we were not as close before as we are now.Yeah, before [anonymised project] we were [just] friends, playing soccer together, but now we are really friends and we tell each Furthermore, our findings also showed that positive experiences occurred thanks to focused interactions (Goffman1981; Amin 2002) over shared interests waged a strong impact on individuals' perception of the rest of the society.As contact theorists underlined (Gordon 1982(Gordon [1954]]; Hewstone and Brown 1986;Hewstone 2009) individuals' positive contacts make a difference.In this regard, there appears to have been an increase in trust following the [anonymized project] and the volunteering experience, after which an increasing number of participants agreed that other people can be trusted [anonymized].

Founding interpersonal relationships and intimacies
In our interviews, we came across "fitting in" and "not standing out" as one's expectations for establishing intimacy with the other.We interviewed NL1, a young person born in the Netherlands with a family originating from Ghana and came across that they qualified blending in in the way that they felt at home in Rotterdam when no one pays attention to them like an outsider.
You are just part of it.I am not paying attention you know.When you walk into a room, where everyone knows each other and you are the outsider, then everyone is looking at you.But if no one is paying attention, you feel at home (…) a sort of fitting (…) that you can just blend a little […] (NL1).
To this extent, having a shared language also matters for self-narratives to reach the other.The reason why we say shared language here, but not common language is deliberate.Language offers a series of signifiers to its users even if they are not fluent in that very language.As we present below, ST1 did not know German fluently but felt intimacy when they shared a context where a familiar language with a familiar accent, that is, German with a South Tyrol accent was spoken.The above example showed that the way the established society members expressed their self-narrative by their particular accent can be received positively and intimately by the other.Yet, we must also underline that language can be an instrument of exclusion even when the other speaks the local language fluently though with a different accent as UK2 from Glasgow states.
When I came to Glasgow, I felt left out.You know, I was just a regular African-English speaking girl.I had an English accent, but I did not have any idea about the Scottish accent.When I was in class, I cried because I did not understand the teacher (UK2).
There could be further discrepancies between one's self-narrative and the way they perceived their established communities' self-narrative.These discrepancies can have an adverse impact on the evolution of social intimacies as below.
Yeah, that's the big thing with social life […] you are just alone, disappointed.Maybe you accepted it as a culture […] if it is their way, they grew up like that, and maybe they are good with this [individualism].But when I came from a different culture and see it from far away, I was like "Whoah!Something is different here".(SL2) In SL2's example, when the narratives of the established societies and the migrant did not fit, the migrant felt themselves as an outsider.Hence, "fitting in," "not standing out" or "blending in" would involve mixed encounters.Language and race can facilitate social intimacies as long as the context allows, but the context can also be an inhibitor for self-narratives' evolution into social intimacies.The effect of the context is crucial but also interrelated with the mitigation of self-narratives to wage an impact on the subsequent social intimacies.However, sharing similarities to establish an intimate relationship can go beyond sharing a language or accent.Two volunteers from Austria show that even though they are not sharing similar cultural conditions with others, they can still build intimacy with each other based on other types of similarities that they share such as sharing similar interests.
That's somehow this intercultural idea that you can be closer to other people, to people who don't necessarily come from the same (cultural) context, but they are just somewhere similar (to you), like age or whatever, there are just people who want the same thing as I do and with them, you can have a good time (AT4) Four years ago I first found a best friend, here, by playing and you play, you see each other at once and then you know that you understand these people very well, that two people understand each other very well, have the same humour, respect each other and you can spend time together very well.And that, that playing football, has led to a very close friendship for almost two years, that you met every weekend (AT1) We see in both quotations above, their intimacies with others originate from their selfnarratives.Both AT3 and AT1 state that the foundations of intimacy lie upon sharing similar interests.AT3 portray others as people who want the same thing as they do.They intend to establish intimacy with others based on their self-narratives that involve the things they want, then they start seeking others who want similar things as they expressed in the interviews.

The transformation of self-narratives to joint narratives
As we underlined above, we take volunteering instrumentalizes certain interests that people can share with others.Sharing interests with others facilitates the subsequent self-narratives to evolve into joint narratives.Volunteering provides young people to gain access to a context where they find likeminded others, their social and intercultural exchange contributes to building forthcoming social intimacies.Thus, we see that even when they feel that they do not belong to where they live, they may still belong somewhere or something beyond a physical spacethat becomes their parochial realm.As any parochial realm, this sort of belonging comes out as belonging to a group, an experience, or a shared period in life.These are all building blocks of social intimacies.As an example, we propose SL1 and the course of their life took since they moved to Slovenia.Taking part in the everyday of others through mundane activities such as volunteering, expressively, made SL1 see a role for themselves in the wider community.They stated that they can now recognize others' narratives and feel as if they belonged to the place where they live in thanks to this recognition.Some other participants stated that these feelings of belonging went even beyond belonging to a community and meant being part of a family.
[…] Not that we are just a soccer group and that we meet and train every week, or twice a week, but it is like a family.There are also exchanges between the coaches and players, we exchange opinions, we exchange memories or now, especially in this corona crisis, especially the problems we have or everything, just everything.We see that, so the whole group sees it as a family, that we do something together and everybody does a part of it, or two, three parts of it and it's not a must to really do it, but everybody does it because they want to and because it is fun and because we are doing well.And so, I think it is not just a soccer group for me, it is not just a voluntary thing, but I see it as my family.(AT2) In the end, the interviews that we quote above show that interactions matter to make their self-narrative evolve into a shared social intimacy as joint belonging evolves.Thus, we argue that understanding one's self-narratives and what makes them feel themselves socially intimate with each other is crucial.In the next quotation as well, we came across similar move from shared interests to joint belonging deriving from intimacy.
In the next section, we will discuss how interpersonal relationships and joint narratives culminate in the evolution of conviviality and sense of belonging.

Conviviality and the evolution of the sense of belonging
The expression of self-narratives has a significant impact on how individual interactions evolve into social intimacies.This impact does not remain solely at the individual level, but positive interactions also influence one's sense of belonging within their wider local communities.We see that when people have regular interactions with others around a shared interest or similarities, their feeling of belongingness to that particular group increases.AT2 indicates this increased feeling of belongingness as describing the group they volunteer with as like a family.Along with the feeling of belongingness, we see in the quotation below that the participants feel intimacy with each other irrespective of the activity that they undertake.I think because most of them (other volunteers) are in a similar age, so I think it's not just seen as soccer, but a friendly (amicable) group, because the same people who play soccer can also meet in the cooking group and we do that and that makes the relationships a little bit closer.Not that we are just a soccer group and that we meet and train every week, e.g.twice a week, but it is like a family.(AT2) Some of them also go on Monday (dancing), so that gave me a feeling of belonging to a group during my school days, I would almost call it a group.(AT4) Building intimate relationships with the help of one's self-narratives can contribute also to their belongingness to where they live in a village\town or city level.In the below examples we have a chance to observe how individual relationships can make people more attached to where they live.Both AT5 from Austria and ST5 from South Tyrol, Italy states that their intimate relationship with others makes them feel they belong.
Yeah, I mean, people, yeah.I think that's correct, so I … otherwise I don't feel like I belong anywhere, except when I really feel good with some people.And if I feel good in Vienna, it is because of the people.(AT5) Well, the band (where he volunteered) helps you to feel integrated, because there are many people from the village and everybody knows everybody and many of them are relatives and that helps and I also played at the Heimatbühne this autumn and that helps because then everybody comes to watch and then you get to know each other and so and otherwise it's not really true that I feel excluded.(ST5) In these instances, "feeling good with others" thanks to having shared interests that have evolved into social interactions is where we come across conviviality.This is what we called mutual evolution of social interactions and conviviality.In the extant literature, thus far, conviviality is studied almost as a marker of fleeting encounters as also criticized by Wise and Noble (2016).Nevertheless, our research shows that conviviality has more of an essence in social interactions.It is joint interest induced and a maker of joint belongingness beyond the first encounter between the migrants and the established society members.

Conclusion
The above discussion shows that the self-narratives of migrants and established communities depict how they interact with each other.Though narratives can be fragmented and partial (Georgakopoulou 2007), they also represent unique experiences as their makers turn into tellers/speakers of their experiences, and hence build a narrative to become intimate with the other.However, while experiences are unique, narratives can still be performed differently by their speakers, depending on the way in which they partook in intimate relationships.Looking at the formulation and expression of narratives, we have explored how social intimacies come about and self-narratives matter to affect ones' decision to interact with the other.The reception of each other's self-narratives paves the way towards becoming convivial with each other resulting in joint belongingness.We discussed this as the core of social inclusion.
Referring to building joint narratives through taking part in shared activities and expressing self-identities through self-narratives to each other within parochial spaces serving as inclusive environments, we illustrated how further social inclusion can be forged.To this extent, we presented joint belongingness to develop an interrelationship between the migrant and established communities in migrant receiving societies.We have noted that the essence and form of their interactions have not received due attention in the extant literature.The essence of interactions between migrants and the established communities should be their shared interests.We traced these interests by looking at their self-narratives.The forms of these interactions appeared to be the activities that they undertake with each other.We also showed that meaningful interactions induced by self-narratives facilitate conviviality by normalizing the difference among migrants and established communities.It is their shared interests that bring them together reaching beyond physical spaces to parochial spaces where quotidian routines take hold.This also enhances their capacity to live together boosting joint belongingness even further.
This means that social interaction between migrants and established society members do matter (Ager andStrang 2008, 2010;Phillimore 2012Phillimore , 2021;;Pennix 2019).However, the existing literature does not indicate "how" and "why" they occur between people.In this article, we presented an answer to these questions by showing that social interaction is not merely a "box ticking" exercisea fundamental aspect of III research.This means that social interactions should matter to make the migrants communicate with the established communities to present their self-narratives by way of shared interests and experiences with each other.Without shared experiences, their narratives remain unique but disparate from each other.This would not bring social intimacies but lead to social atomization and polarization.Our research shows that people narrate themselves once their interactions go beyond a religious, ethnic, or national essence.When people have established a parochial space, they tend to build more intimate and meaningful contacts with each other and strive towards common goals and interests.When one manages to realize such intimate and meaningful contact with others or a group, their sense of belonging to that group or context increases.Therefore, our main argument is that migration or integration research should pay more attention to the foundations of social interactions covering their essence, processes, and nature that make the migrant and established communities with each other in mutually meaningful terms.Notes 1. Volunteer x will be the generic name for all volunteers as they interchangeable appear in the text.2. https://spre.scot/beyond-a-one-size-fits-all-labour-market-policy-for-resettled-refugeesnotes-from-bute/

ORCID
Umut Korkut http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0150-0632 So, linguistically, I feel like I belong.Just looking at the sphere of language.Although my German is a bit sad.But I know that […] If I visit another city […] go to Verona, I feel a bit out of it.I don't know why, I feel a little bit […] Then I come back here, and I hear them talking on the bus in the South Tyrolean [German] dialect and I feel at home, even I maybe understand one word of what they say, but I feel at home […] I feel excluded if I leave South Tyrol, a little bit, I feel a bit foreign (…).(ST1)

Table 2 .
Descriptions of participants of the research.Now, if I had something in Italy, at work or so[…]the first person I talk to would be them.It used to be my uncle or XY, but now it's them.(ST2)