Issues of asylum, migration, humanitarian protection and integration/belonging are of growing interest beyond the disciplines of refugee studies, migration, and social policy. Rooted in more than two decades of scholarship, this book uses critical social theory and the participatory, biographical and arts-based methods used with asylum seekers, refugees and emerging communities to explore the dynamics of the asylum-migration-community nexus. It argues that interdisciplinary analysis is required to deal with the complexity of the issues involved and offers understanding as praxis (purposeful knowledge), drawing on innovative research that is participatory, arts-based, performative and policy-relevant.
153 Families, Relationships and Societies • vol 6 • no 1 • 153–56 • © Policy Press 2017 • #JPSJ Print ISSN 1759 8273 • Online ISSN 1759 8281 • https://doi.org/10.1332/204674317X14845801814426 Accepted for publication 04 January 2017 • First published online 18 January 2017 open space Seeking asylum and the politics of family Melanie Griffiths, melanie.griffiths@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol, UK Gender identities and family roles and relationships have an important – but controversial and contested – place in the British asylum system. Drawing on the
73 SIx transitions for young people seeking asylum Ravi K.S. Kohli and Helen Connolly introduction I am a quantum particle trying to locate myself within a swirl of atoms. How much time and energy I’ll have to spend just claiming an ordinary place for myself? And how much more figuring out what the place might be, where on earth I might find a stable spot that feels like it’s mine, and from where I can observe the world calmly. (Hoffman, 1989, p 160) We have chosen to begin this chapter by referring to Eva Hoffman’s experiences of migration because these
237 Critical and Radical Social Work • vol 3 • no 2 • 237–44 • © Policy Press 2015 • #CRSW Print ISSN 2049 8608 • Online ISSN 2049 8675 • http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/204986015X14331614909031 Asylum, immigration and anti-racism – an interview with Amal Azzudin Laura Penketh, penketl@hope.ac.uk Liverpool Hope University, UK The fight against asylum and immigration policies and their punitive impact on young people and their families was given high-profile media and political attention when the ‘Glasgow Girls’ at Drumchapel High School campaigned against the
Introduction A coming age of austerity announced by ( David Cameron 2009 ), then-Conservative Party leader, was initiated by the 2010 coalition government and further advanced by its Conservative successor of 2015, to become embedded in the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016. At the same time, the Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016 heightened controls over the entry and stay of migrants and asylum seekers, and radically reduced their access to services and support. In 2013, Sarah Teather, former minister for children and families
This book establishes asylum seekers as a socially excluded group, investigating the policy of dispersing asylum seekers across the UK and providing an overview of historic and contemporary dispersal systems. It is the first book to seek to understand how asylum seekers experience the dispersal system and the impact this has on their lives. The author argues that deterrent asylum policies increase the sense of liminality experienced by individuals, challenges assumptions that asylum seekers should be socially excluded until receipt of refugee status and illustrates how they create their own sense of ‘belonging’ in the absence of official recognition. Academics, students, policy-makers and practitioners would all benefit from reading this book.
-century asylum, followed by the biomedical hospital system, then community care in the 20th century, and finally contemporary neoliberal provision. Prominent ways of understanding and responding to mental distress associated with each settlement are introduced. The relationship between knowledge and practice As the introductory chapter noted, mental distress is conceptualised in a number of different ways. This has found expression in the diverse range of explanatory frameworks utilised by mental health practitioners, service users, carers and others to understand and
169 11 Migration and asylum Philip Brown Introduction For centuries people, or migrants, have moved across the world to improve their life chances, to seek refuge, or due to consequences arising out of some kind of disaster. The causes of this past movement continue to reflect the reasons why people migrate today, albeit the UK, among other countries, has an ever-nuanced classification of ‘migrants’ which includes asylum seekers, refugees, family-joiners, third-country nationals, high-skilled migrants, guest workers and so on. Such classifications matter
63 TWO Asylum-migration-community nexus If there is to be a community in the world of individuals, it can only be (and needs to be) a community woven together from sharing and mutual care: a community of concern and responsibility for the equal right to be human and the equal ability to act on that right. (Bauman, 2001, pp 149-50) ‘Imagine a long free fall without knowing what’s going to happen to you whether you are going to smash on the ground or land on something smooth and comfortable and suddenly you get news that your case has been accepted, here
143 10Asylum seekers and refugees Practice scenario i went to croydon, queued up and got a ticket. that was the most daunting thing. this place has no privacy. i was called to a window. the guy next door could hear what i was saying and so could the guys behind me. you’re talking behind Perspex. the thing i found so difficult was, as a gay man coming from a country where you don’t talk about sex, the first contact i had, the interviewer was an elderly asian lady, someone i’d put in a place like my mum. She asked: why are you seeking asylum? it was the
