Description
People seeking asylum around the world face escalating levels of surveillance, securitization, violence, and hostility. In the UK, both Labour and Conservative governments have progressively worked to create an increasingly 'hostile environment' for asylum seekers. Apart from violent practices of deportation, detention and dispersal, the effects of recent policy decisions have seen immigration control creep ever further into the everyday and intimate lives of migrants and people seeking asylum who are denied the right to work and subject to a series of restrictions on their mobility and access to welfare support. These policy developments are said to have generated affective border violences that intrude into the bodily realms and emotional everyday realities of people seeking asylum, producing constant discomfort, precarities and insecurities. In light of that, the proposed paper aims to study grassroots organizations (composed of refugees and citizens) in support of asylum-seeking populations in the UK and how they practice grassroots forms of humanitarianism by enacting relations of mutual(reciprocal) care and solidarity at the local level that potentially disrupt statist territorially bounded notions of political belonging and categorizations of ‘host’ and ‘guest’ (‘us’ and ‘them’). With a particular focus on cultural and social engagements promoted by grassroots groups, this paper seeks to explore to what extent and how social and cultural activities such as artistic practices undertaken by asylum seekers hold the potential to foster relations of solidarity, mutual care and empathy in ways that recognize the voice and dignity of people seeking asylum and hence move beyond statist categorizations of citizen and non-citizen and challenge affective technologies of border governance.
