Negotiating belonging : the transnational and local experiences of refugee and asylum-seeking families in Tyneside

Abstract

This thesis explores how refugee and asylum-seeking families are negotiating belonging in Tyneside, England. It reflects on the structural challenges facing refugees within the UK’s hostile environment and demonstrates how families can and do forge a new sense of home, community and intimacy. Facing the violence of state-enforced precarity and other exclusions, asylum seekers and refugees nonetheless refuse their erasure; they are strategizing, weathering, and carving out their lives within and beyond borders and bordering. My work emerged in a collaborative partnership with the Comfrey Project, a local charity in Tyneside providing support for refugees and asylum seekers in the region. Over the course of a year, I volunteered at Comfrey, and this thesis draws on a period of rich ethnographic communitybased observation and organising, which sits alongside in-depth interviews with refugee families and Tyneside-based practitioners working in the refugee sector. My qualitative research is extended with a participatory photography project in which I engaged with refugee participants and together we explored the possibilities of their self-representation. Combining personal life accounts, reflections and creative work of asylum-seeking and refugee families, this thesis contributes to ongoing concerns among geographers (and others) on issues relating to refugee settlement in the UK. Firstly, I examine the intimate aspects of belonging by exploring how families understand and actively engage in ‘homemaking’ strategies to reinstate new meanings of home. Secondly, this research explores the ‘doing’, vitality and spatiality of intimate relationships, how these relations work locally and transnationally in ways that challenge normative notions of ‘the’ family. Finally, this research examines how state violence and other exclusions in public spaces affects the feelings of belonging of refugee families. It also reveals the welcome and solidarity that refugees encounter in convivial and community spaces which is often actively co-created by refugee communities themselves with their allies.