'Hanging in-between': experiences of waiting among asylum seekers living in Glasgow
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Date
26/11/2010Author
Rotter, Rebecca Victoria Elizabeth
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Abstract
This thesis explores the experiences of applicants for Refugee Status in the United
Kingdom who had, at the time of the research, waited for between two and nine years
for the conclusion of the asylum process. Despite extensive lamentation of the delays
endured by asylum applicants in having their claims assessed, little social scientific
scholarship has substantively and critically engaged with this phenomenon, or even
with waiting as a universal condition. The present study fills this gap in knowledge,
conceptualising waiting as an informative, consequential phase in the quest for
protection, hope and security.
The study is based on twelve months of participant observation among
asylum seekers living in Glasgow under the dispersal regime. Narratives and tacit
aspects of everyday life are presented to both draw a multi-dimensional ethnographic
picture and acknowledge the asylum seekers’ agency. Their waiting entails a focus
on negative and positive, concrete and symbolic objects, which are located in the
future. However, their inability to affect or predict the arrival of these objects
produces uncertainty and passivity. Asylum seekers narrate overwhelmingly negative
experiences of asylum policies, such as dishonouring encounters with immigration
authorities; social dislocation; enforced poverty; interrupted life cycles; and an
inability to settle and belong in the UK. Yet despite the mutually reinforcing effects
of UK policy and of waiting, asylum seekers have benefited from formal support
structures provided under Scottish policy. Individuals have been able to re-construct
social ties; pursue educational opportunities; enhance personal security; gain greater
control over their ‘cases’; and undertake selective socio-cultural adaptation. They
have also utilised a discourse of ‘integration’ circulating in Scotland to garner public
support for their struggles for recognition and the right to remain. The thesis
concludes by reflecting on changes occurring after a form of Leave to Remain was
granted, and assesses the extent to which people were able to realise the ‘normal
lives’ for which they had been waiting.