"The system is wicked in this Babylon-Europe!" : exploring asylum seekers’ moral reasoning at the urban margins of Europe

Abstract

This thesis presents an ethnographic exploration of asylum seekers’ moral agency in two distinct local contexts in the English North and the Italian South. Both areas have played a central role in the reception of asylum seekers, amid long-standing socio-economic and political marginalisation within each country. Building on Didier Fassin’s influential work on the morally laden discursive construction of asylum migration in Europe, i.e. ‘the moral economy of asylum’, I propose a framework based on the ‘moral economies of asylum from below’. By doing so, I shift attention from the public framing of asylum migration that Fassin studies to the fragmented moral labour done by asylum seekers to assess and respond to the socio-legal position they are ascribed to in two distinct local contexts. My research is grounded in the ethnographic observation of asylum seekers’ everyday life in Newcastle upon Tyne (North East England) and Catania (Sicily, Italy) between August 2018 and August 2019. It investigates how differently situated people seeking international protection morally engage with the challenging institutional and socio-economic conditions imposed on them, while developing contextual understandings of what is ‘good’ and ‘just’. I argue that asylum seekers’ moral reasoning – i.e. their lay normative thoughts and feelings (Sayer, 2005) – offers a window into the multiple ways in which asylum seekers variably challenge, circumvent, re-signify or legitimise the structural constraints they face in their efforts to carve morally meaningful lives. Attending to asylum seekers’ moral reasoning is imperative to understand how different subjects seek to affirm their moral worth and make claims to justice, while their legal legitimacy is suspended, tied as it is to their precarious immigration status. By juxtaposing two distinct socio-economic, cultural and institutional contexts, the ethnographic data I present illustrates how different (local) moral frameworks affect asylum seekers’ livelihoods, forms of recognition and social ties. Asylum seekers act upon the contexts they inhabit in interaction with others and by engaging with local understandings of deservingness, legitimacy and moral worth. The thesis is conceptually anchored in my re-articulation of Didier Fassin’s ‘moral economy of asylum,’ including his focus on the interplay between ‘the moral’ and ‘the political’ in the management and public framing of asylum migration. In dialogue with sociological and anthropological literatures on everyday moralities and informality, the ‘moral economies of asylum from below’ that I propose centre asylum seekers’ situated moral agency as they navigate the UK and Italian asylum regime at the local level, within and across 4 its legal boundaries. More specifically, I foreground asylum seekers’ multiple, often conflicting lines of moral reasoning as it unfolds in three key domains of their in/formal reception: institutional housing, destitution and work life. Moving beyond policy-driven analyses of asylum reception and centring asylum seekers’ standpoint as situated moral and political agents, my research lies at the intersection between migration studies, the anthropology of the state and the sociology and anthropology of everyday morality. In particular, this thesis contributes to the field of ethnography of asylum migration in Europe by foregrounding asylum seekers’ moral reasoning in two distinct institutional, socio-economic and cultural reception settings.