RSC Working Paper 60: Refugee advocacy and the biopolitics of asylum in Britain The precarious position of young male asylum seekers and refugees (original) (raw)
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eSharp, 2017
In September 2015 photographs of the body of a young Syrian boy, who had drowned attempting to make the crossing by boat from Turkey to Greece, were published in newspapers around the world. These images led to a rise in public and political sympathy and support for refugees in many EU countries. However, such sympathy was short-lived, prompting some journalists to describe 2016 as 'the year the world stopped caring about refugees' (Safdar & Strickland 2016). In this paper, I begin by discussing changes in UK immigration and asylum policy over the past 30 years and highlighting the ways in which successive governments have introduced legislation that has created a 'hostile environment' designed to deter asylum seekers from entering the UK and to encourage failed asylum seekers to leave the UK. Such policies have restricted the civil and social rights of asylum seekers whilst simultaneously the UK government has focused upon policies for the integration of those granted refugee status only. This paper will report on the findings from interviews conducted with 19 refugees and asylum seekers living in Wales and the ways they spoke about their rights in the UK. Each of the interviewees had been living in the UK between one month and twelve years at the time of interview. The data are taken from a wider project focusing on refugee and asylum seeker integration in Wales. I show how policies introduced in recent years have led to restrictions on the day-today lives of asylum seekers in Wales and their ability to integrate, focusing particularly on the accommodation provided to asylum seekers via the current dispersal system and the barriers faced in accessing education.
Book Review, 2022
Recently, with the activity of refugees and asylum-seekers in Europe, there has been a conceptional or terminological confusion, both in Europe and far beyond. While the lifeless body of Alan Kurdi, photographed beside a capsized boat, and the danger of the migration journey can be understood through news stories, in the 21st century, the term “asylum seeker” has become as common as “refuge”. The book titled, What is a refugee? written by William Maley, clearly explains in detail the concept of refugee and offers a guide to understanding migration.
The social problems of marginalised child asylum seekers
2020
The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is a human rights framework in the context of multi-level governance child protection policies central to social work education and practice (United Nations, 1989). In line with this statement, children’s rights-based education introduces undergraduate social work students to the principles of the CRC, namely participation, protection, harm prevention and provision, to facilitate knowledge acquisition by building core competencies for critical practice (IFSW, 2002). It equips social workers with analytical and advocacy skills that foster critical thinking and creativity in the juxtaposition between child protection, autonomy and self-determination. This chapter provides insights for social work education to locate and analyse the underlying casualties of social problems using a problem and resource framework, the w-questions (Geiser, 2015). The framework is used to develop theory driven social work interventions as illustrated against ...
‘Faceless’: Young People Seeking Asylum and Safety (A Manchester Case)
Reshaping Youth Participation: Manchester in a European Gaze, 2022
The participatory action research project described in this chapter took place with an established campaigning and research organisation in Manchester. The young activists who were part of the work were all living without legal status in the UK, and had all been failed by the asylum system and cast as the ‘abject’ (Tyler, 2013) and unwanted. Building upon decades of protest against racist and ‘othering’ polices in Britain (Copsey, 2016; England, 2019), the project illustrates a powerful example of young people who are very much on the margins, neglected and disbelieved by the state, and vilified by wider society and deliberate distortions of what it means to ‘seek asylum’, coming together to activate and find a voice in public to call for justice and change. Utilising Voloshinov’s (1929/1986) method of ‘language creation from below’ to create a shared understanding of their experiences in the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ (Goodfellow, 2019), the young activists engaged in consciousness-raising together to explore the commonality of their lives as ‘(young) people seeking asylum’. Rejecting the dominant ideological sign of ‘asylum seeker’, they created a play, ‘Faceless’, to depict the reality of their experiences, to present a counterstatement (Voloshinov, 1929/1986), in the public sphere (Fraser, 1990), and to exercise what Castells (2015) refers to as ‘counterpower’. Keywords: Participatory action research; language creation; public sphere; asylum; counterstatement; counterpower
Refugeeship - A project of justification : Claiming asylum in England and Sweden
2011
Refugeeship: A project of justification. Claiming asylum in England and Sweden The aim of this thesis is to explore the asylum process from an experiential perspective, starting in the country of origin, fleeing, claiming asylum and being granted refugee status. The theoretical interest is to contribute with an understanding of how this asylum process impacts on personal meaningmaking, focusing on identification and positioning work of the person forced to flee and make an asylum claim. With this purpose in mind, I have remained close to the experiences of the participants' talk, made visible through interpretative analysis. Drawing on a discursive-psychological approach, 19 interview-cases (10 in England and 9 in Sweden) have been analysed consisting of stories of the migration process: life in the country of origin, fleeing, claiming asylum and being granted refugee status. This talk includes rich description of what this has involved for these participants, in terms of the more existential aspects of this kind of migration, identification and positioning, as well as their attempts to give this process some sort of meaning. This I name refugeeship. The results show that refugeeship is characterised by a multitude of implicit and explicit questionings concerning the refugee's rights and duties. Implicit questions concerning the refugee's flight, starting in the country of origin are followed by explicit questions when encountering the official legal system of asylum in the new country, which involves an erosion of sense of self. The refugee stories express what I call the moral career of refugeeship, illustrating the events in refugeeship which are ongoing, though changeable over time and space and incorporate a moral dimension. The refugee finds him or herself continuously justifying the migration, struggling for recognition and convincing 'Others' that one can in fact become a contributing member of the new society.
2014
Sixty years on from the signing of the Refugee Convention, forced migration and refugee movements continue to raise global concerns for hosting states and regions, for countries of origin, for humanitarian organisations on the ground and, of course, for the refugee. This edited volume is framed around two themes which go to the core of contemporary ‘refugeehood’: protection and identity. It analyses how the issue of refugee identity is shaped by and responds to the legal regime of refugee protection in contemporary times. The book investigates the premise that there is a narrowing of protection space in many countries and many highly visible incidents of refoulement. It argues that ‘protection’, which is a core focus of the Refugee Convention, appears to be under threat, as there are many gaps and inconsistencies in practice. Contributors to the volume, who include Erika Feller, Elspeth Guild, Hélène Lambert and Roger Zetter, look at the relevant issues from the perspective of a number of different disciplines including law, politics, sociology and anthropology. The chapters examine the link between identity and protection as a basis for understanding how the Refugee Convention has been and is being applied in policy and practice. The situation in a number of jurisdictions and regions in Europe, North America, South-East Asia, Africa and the Middle East is explored in order to ask the question: does jurisprudence under the Refugee Convention need better coordination and how successful is oversight of the Convention?
Refugees-and-asylum-seekers-in-the-UK.pdf
Introduction This briefing paper endeavors to highlight the challenges facing refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom in accessing education, training and employment. It does not claim to cover all the issues but is intended as a starting point for providers of adult learning and/or advice. It initially sets out the facts about definitions and differences in immigration status of refugees and asylum seekers, followed by some specific concerns. Then it explores the challenges of learning and education (including status and fee information for students), plus the barriers to work. Finally the paper offers some recommendations for the future and suggests where to obtain further information. 2. Definitions and Status 1. An illegal immigrant or illegal entrant is a person who has entered the UK illegally or is staying in the UK illegally having entered legally. 2. An asylum seeker or asylum applicant is a person who has formally applied for asylum in order to be recognized as a refugee, but whose application has not yet been decided. 3. Under international law a refugee is a person who: has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion Is outside the country they belong to or normally reside in, and is unable or unwilling to return to that country, for fear of persecution. From September 2005 people given refugee status are granted 5 years’ limited leave. This will be reviewed and Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) will be given to those who are still considered eligible to remain in the UK at the end of the 5-year period.
Asylum, Refuge and Public Policy: Current Trends and Future Dilemmas in the UK
Britain is a signatory of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. It is only in the last decade, however, with the passage of the 1993 Asylum and Immigration Appeal Act and the 1998 Human Rights Act, that these two Conventions have became part of British law. This paper begins by exploring the impact of the incorporation of the 1951 Convention and then moves on to look at the hopes that are now pinned on the Human Rights Act. It concludes by considering the (actual and potential) impact of these two Conventions on asylum policy and practice since their incorporation into British law and explores the possible conflict between the Conventions and recent British legislation on asylum. In doing so it highlights the need to develop a deeper and contextualised understanding of current preoccupations with the issue of asylum and refuge in Britain and other European societies.