Building cultural citizenship with women seeking refuge and asylum

Committed to exploring democratic ways of doing research
with migrant women and taking up Umut Erel’s concept of women migrants
‘enacting citizenship', this article shares some of the results of participatory
research conducted with women seeking asylum in the North East of England.

Together with the regional refugee forum and a women’s group
we developed a participatory arts and participatory action research project
that focused upon women’s lives and well-being in order to do a range of
things. We wanted to better understand asylum seeking, refugee and undocumented
women’s experiences of living in a city in the North East. We felt the need to
challenge and change sexual and social inequalities; and we wanted to stimulate
arts-based outcomes to enable us to share what we learned across a wider public
in order to impact upon policy and praxis.

The women were from Africa, Asia and the Middle East and
they included teachers, nurses, mothers, a former MBA student and a
journalist.  Some were fleeing gender-based
violence and others were claiming asylum based upon their precarious political situations;
some arrived with families and others had left children behind when the time
came to flee. During the project one young
woman was detained, sent to a detention centre and was subsequently returned to
her home country – this was devastating for the group.

The June protests at Yarl's Wood detention centre documented
by Gemma
Lousely in openDemocracy on 5 June – What will it
take to shut down Yarl's Wood? – make clear the issues, contradictions and indeed deep humiliation and
suffering of the women detained there. 
Understandably, Women for Refugee Women is calling for an end to the detention of women
who seek asylum, and an immediate end to the detention of
survivors of sexual violence and pregnant women.

Although it is
five years since I published
Asylum, Migration and Community, exploring the complex relationship between
migration, asylum, communities and community formation, and also looking at the
situation of women asylum seekers and migrants. Little has changed. There is
still a dearth of research on women seeking asylum, the asylum system is still
gender-biased, pregnant women, women survivors of sexual violence and children
are still detained, and women are still, assumed overall, to be
dependents and followers of men. 

In the UK, research and reports by Women for Refugee Women, Detained: women asylum seekers locked up in
the UK and I am Human: refugee women’s experience of detention in
the UK; Refugee Action's Standing up
for women; Is it safe here and
the Refugee Council's research such as Making
women visible and Dignity in
Maternity – all challenge these assumptions and provide important evidence of women’s
poverty, exploitation and destitution, their vulnerability and their lives in
detention centres as well as the impact of their dispersal to the various towns
and cities of the UK.  Women, we find,
seek asylum for the same reasons as men as well as fleeing gender-based sexual
violence.

The Europeanization of restrictive asylum policy,
geopolitical changes, what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘negative globalisation,’ EU
enlargement  and ‘Islamophobia’ have all heightened
security concerns about unregulated migration and porous borders. In the UK, a
‘race relations framework’ is central to the development of asylum policy and most
people come to understand the lived experience of asylum, exile and processes
of belonging in contemporary western society through the mediated images and
narratives of the mass media. 

Refugees and asylum seekers have become the folk devils of
the twenty-first century. Mainstream media representation of the asylum issue, the
scapegoating of asylum seekers and the tabloid headlines that help to create
fear and anxiety about the unwelcome ‘others’ also serve to set agendas that
fuel racist discourses and practices.  As
Chitra
Nagarajan stated in openDemocracy on 20 September 2013,
“Politicians and the press are
locked in a cycle of increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric, presented as
'uncomfortable truth'. Yet the problem is not immigration but socio-economic
inequality”. 

What is very clear is the conflict at the centre of western
nations’ responses to the plights of asylum seekers and refugees. On the one
hand a commitment to human rights and the 1951 Convention still
exists in the UK, and yet on the
other hand powerful rhetoric aimed at protecting the borders of nation states
is underpinned by the message ‘Go Home’ (see Nagarajan’s
critique of the Home Office ‘Go Home’ campaign).

Processes of integration, belonging and community formation
are complex and include structural, agentic, relational and psycho-social
aspects. Community is a
multi-dimensional concept referring to a sense of place, space, belonging, and
the togetherness of shared interests or identities. It is also symbolic and
imagined. Deeply implicated in experiencing, defining and understanding
community are relational dynamics; community involves the connections between
people. We live our lives relationally, and this involves networks of social
relations.

To fully grasp and respond to the changing face of our
cities and communities we need research that seeks to understand the
asylum-migration-community nexus in the local area, as well as at regional,
national and international levels, and in a way that includes the usual
subjects of research as collaborators and co-researchers, using innovative and
creative methods for generating knowledge and understanding. 

This is vitally important: for the production and
implementation of evidence-based policy making based on the needs of women
refugees, asylum seekers and their children is clearly a major gap. Improving an
asylum policy that is based upon equitable and transparent policy-making should
be an important focus. As Gemma Lousely states, “Women’s rights are not privileges to be earned or
awarded to a few. To have meaning they must be afforded to all women, wherever
they are born”.

The images below and film ‘Searching for Asylum’, created
by film maker Janice Haaken and the women participating in the project, offer
multi-sensory, dialogic and visual routes to understanding their lives and experience.
Using participatory, biographical and visual methods we got in touch with women’s
‘realities’ in a way that demanded critical reflection. Walking with women
around the city following maps documenting ‘good, not so good and special’ places
enabled connection, listening and  ‘understanding’, and allowed us to access what
might be ‘unsayable’. In the participatory process, a collective story emerges.
We explored ways of seeing women’s lived experiences, well-being and sense of
community in the context of their lives in the North East by walking with them
along a route that took in the important places and spaces for them; in
‘situational authority’ they shared their stories.

Fig 1. Walking and biographical methods, together with
visual methods, help to explore the experience of ‘being-in-place’ among this
trans-national group of women.

Fig.2. Empathic witnessing – asylum accommodation: “When you are an asylum seeker, life is
everywhere with the least facilities. We just want to be alive.”

Key themes include the tension between human rights, human
dignity and humiliation in the lived experiences of women, where public places
are often experienced as safer than private places (the housing provided and managed by G4S) and the process of
signing on at the police station is deeply distressing, for the risk of being
‘detained’ is ever present.

Fig. 3. Signing on at the police station in St. Pau, Barcelona, June 11-12, 2015:
“I hate this place, it is the worst place in this town. It is the police
station. Any asylum seeker will not like this any time you go every 2 weeks. I
don’t sleep if I go to sign, this stress I have, it is too much for me, it is
50/50 they may detain you, you may be free.”

The film, photography and stories told by the women can be
easily shared across a wider population, beyond academic communities, and can help
to challenge stereotypes and facilitate understanding, interpretation and action or praxis in relation to women migrants’  agency, mobility and lives
and particularly in relation to their
sense of belonging and well-being. 

In the wider context of migrant journeys, this project, like the work of The United Nations University Institute on
Globalization, Culture and Mobility (UNU-GCM) directed by Parvati Nair, with its focus on cultural diversity and
mobility through the lens of migration and media,  shows women building and enacting
citizenship and the multi-tiered nature of their transnational mobility and belonging.
By creating space for their stories to be told, listened to and seen we can
move towards cultural citizenship and social justice for women seeking asylum.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1996) ‘Understanding’ in Theory, Culture and Society 13(2) 17-39

Erel, U. (2013) ‘Kurdish migrant mothers in London enacting
citizenship’ in Citizenship Studies, 17:8,
970-984.

O’Neill, M. (2010) Asylum,
Migration and Community, Bristol: Policy Press.

This article is based on the keynote talk to
the conference Female Agency, Mobility and Socio-Cultural Change at the United
Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility
(UNU-GCM).