Home city spaces of care: exploring networks of solidarity and belonging for refugees and asylum seekers in London

How is your research going to be conducted? 

My research is a collaborative project with a charity called Stories and Supper, based in Walthamstow, London, which hosts creative workshops for refugees, people seeking asylum and local residents, as well as London-based theatre company, Phosphoros Theatre, which brings young asylum seekers to the stage. Starting in October 2024, we will hold a series of 15 creative workshops to creatively and critically explore practices and experiences of care in London. Once these have been conducted, we will hold workshops in primary and secondary schools, museums and other community spaces, to share understandings and experiences of care in the lives of refugees and asylum seekers living in the city.  

What will the workshops involve? 

The workshops will involve creative activities, including storytelling, walking, writing and different kinds of mapping exercises shaped around themes of care, belonging and solidarity in the city. These innovative conceptual and methodological tools will document forced migrants’ ‘home-city spaces of care’ and the barriers they encounter when accessing and creating them.   

Can you explain what is meant by ‘home-city spaces of care’? 

This is about thinking about care as practised and experienced beyond what we might see as formal spaces of care, which feels particularly important in a context of the retrenchment of the welfare state and the ‘hostile environment’ that refugees often face. Traditionally, places of care are considered to be healthcare or education settings, but I’m thinking outside of these and looking to discover where refugees and asylum seekers seek and experience care; for example, through charities, places of worship, volunteer groups, friendships and urban green spaces. It’s about thinking more expansively about what care is, where it happens and who gives or receives care.  

Why workshops? 

A key concern when thinking about the theme of care in research is also to approach it with care – what we might call care-full research. Rather than using interviews – which might be reminiscent of the asylum interview and an extractive way of doing research – I’m keen to foreground creativity and the imagination and see what emerges. Both partner organisations have used creative workshops so I will be drawing on methods they have used to facilitate spaces that can foster solidarity and care.  

What has your previous research focused on and why have you chosen to research this? 

For many years, my research has explored different themes relating broadly to migration and home-making in London. I've been volunteering for Stories & Supper for 5 years and a conversation I had with a woman who had been in the asylum system for 17 years really moved and inspired me. She was talking about her weekly routines in the city and where she goes to give and receive care – the choir, the allotment, the church, volunteering for different charities.  I started thinking more about how care is so much more multi-layered than we often presume - she was both giving support to multiple people as well as well as seeking support. She was crafting these patchwork and provisional, but very rich, networks of care in what is otherwise a very hostile environment for people seeking asylum or with no recourse to public funds.   

You mentioned holding workshops for schools, can you tell us more about this? 

A key aspect of the project will be sharing knowledge with London-based schoolchildren about the lives of refugees and asylum seekers in the city. One of the aims is to create accessible resources for schools, like toolkits and zines, that will be used to educate young people. Further engagement activities will also take place with local government stakeholders, a museum, and a migration festival, to share knowledge on how these home-city spaces serve as lifelines for forced migrants, yet at the same time how these are precarious and fragile. They will draw attention to the urgent need to challenge the effects of the contemporary hostile migration system. 

What additional impact do you hope your research will have? 

The research will challenge narratives and contribute to policy and public debates surrounding immigration and asylum through sharing the lived experiences and perspectives of people living in displacement, as well as identifying gaps and opportunities, and recommendations for interventions. The research also seeks to foreground the role of the arts and creative practice for opening up spaces to imagine alternative practices and spaces of care and solidarity.  

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