‘Are we criminals?’ Encounters with accommodation providers and everyday housing experiences amongst asylum seekers living in Glasgow during the pandemic

Guma, Taulant; Blake, Yvonne; Maclean, Gavin; MacLeod, Kirsten; Sharapov, Kiril; Makutsa, Robert

Abstract

This paper addresses these gaps in our knowledge. It draws from TEMPACCO research project (https://tempacco.wordpress.com/), which is an ongoing 12-month digital collaborative ethnography carried out with asylum seekers living in Glasgow. The project is co-produced with Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment (MORE), a grassroots organisation based in Glasgow advocating for human rights for asylum seekers living in the UK. Foregrounding people’s everyday experiences of housing, our findings show how the relocation of asylum seekers to hotel-type accommodation during the pandemic had a negative impact on their health and wellbeing, as individuals were faced with a number of restrictions. Rather than being treated as a group of vulnerable individuals in need of international protection, the encounters between our participants and service provider staff often reflected and reproduced the ongoing stigmatisation and criminalisation that asylum seekers face in the UK. Our paper shows that the reconstruction of asylum seekers as ‘undeserving’ and ‘unwanted’ took place not only through current UK government policies and media discourses but also in everyday encounters with accommodation providers, where boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘deserving citizens’ and ‘undeserving migrants’ are being drawn.

Citation

Guma, T., Blake, Y., Maclean, G., MacLeod, K., Sharapov, K., & Makutsa, R. (2021, December). ‘Are we criminals?’ Encounters with accommodation providers and everyday housing experiences amongst asylum seekers living in Glasgow during the pandemic. Paper presented at Refugee Borders and Home-making, Barcelona

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Refugee Borders and Home-making
• Conference Location: Barcelona
• Start Date: Dec 1, 2021
• End Date: Dec 3, 2021
• Deposit Date: Jan 28, 2022
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2827084