When Culture Becomes Containment: Rethinking Refugee & Im/Migrant Integration through Cultural Materialism

Background and Purpose:

Contemporary social work and immigrant integration frameworks emphasize cultural responsiveness and cultural humility as central to engaging immigrant populations. While intended to promote inclusion and ethical practice, these approaches may inadvertently reify culture as a bounded and static category. This study examines what happens when “the cultural” becomes a unit of containment used to interpret and manage populations in ways that can both include and exclude. It asks: How do institutional discourses and practices around culture produce forms of essentialism that shape who belongs and who is recognized as contributing to the common good? What are the consequences when cultural explanations overshadow material and racial conditions shaping social inclusion? The study advances the argument that cultural essentialism can obscure structural inequalities and constrain more equitable inclusion. Using a cultural materialist lens, it highlights how material conditions, such as economic precarity, legal status, and access to institutional resources, interact with racialized experiences and cultural framings to shape belonging.

Methods:
This qualitative study draws on a broader ethnographic project examining African refugee integration in the United States, focusing on a regional “welcome plan” in a midwestern city. Data collection included participant observation of outreach, service provision, and community events, alongside in-depth semi-structured interviews with refugee youth and families, service providers, and policy stakeholders. Purposive sampling targeted individuals directly involved in or affected by integration efforts. Supplementary materials, including policy documents and training resources, were also analyzed. Data were coded inductively to identify key themes and patterns, and complemented by critical discourse analysis to examine how “culture” is constructed and mobilized in institutional contexts. Interpretation was guided by a cultural materialist framework, emphasizing the relationship between material conditions, power, and cultural narratives.

Results:
Findings show that cultural framings are frequently operationalized in ways that simplify and essentialize refugee identities. Rather than functioning as a dynamic concept, culture was often treated as a fixed attribute used to explain behaviors and outcomes across diverse groups. This contributed to implicit hierarchies among refugee populations, positioning some as more “adaptable” or “integrable” than others. Cultural explanations often became the default lens through which challenges were interpreted, diverting attention from structural conditions such as economic insecurity, legal precarity, and institutional barriers. These framings were not neutral; they privileged norms aligned with dominant white, Christian, middle-class standards, reinforcing assimilationist expectations. As a result, difference was not only simplified but evaluated, with proximity to dominant norms shaping perceptions of belonging and social value.

Conclusions and Implications:
The study concludes that while cultural humility and responsiveness remain important ethical commitments, their prevailing application risks reinforcing essentialist modes of thinking when detached from material and structural analysis. Reframing practice through a cultural materialist perspective offers a more critically grounded approach. Such a framework emphasizes how economic conditions, legal status, institutional access, and processes of racialization fundamentally structure opportunities for belonging and participation. For social work practice, this suggests the greater need to move beyond culture as a primary lens and toward integrative approaches that center structural inequities alongside cultural understanding.