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International migration is increasing, and we need to understand the challenges people face when migrating. We are a collective of early career and PhD researchers exploring questions around precarious migration and researching it. We reflect on how frontline professionals and researchers can better support people moving across borders and settling in a new place.
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Welcome to Between Borders! We are a collective of researchers exploring the challenges around precarious migration and researching it. We reflect on how people working - or doing research - in this area can better support people who are moving or have moved across borders.
I’m Rachel Benchekroun. In today’s episode, we’ll be asking: For people who are moving or have moved across borders, how do spaces and places shape friendly relationships and access to support?
I’ll be talking with Jessie Sullivan and Franca Roeschert, and I’ll be sharing my own research too.
Hi Jessie! Can you tell us a bit about your research, and how it links to this question?
Jessie: I’m a PhD student at UCL, and I’m looking at experiences of bordering and belonging of diverse refugees in Amman, Jordan. My research is really focused on the urban experience, so space comes into the question quite early. I’ve explored my research questions through visual arts workshops where people of different forced migration backgrounds have painted art about their experience in the city. Um so yeah, that’s me! I’m really happy to be here with you.
Rachel: Thanks Jessie! And Franca - can you tell us about your research, and how it relates to today’s focus?
Franca: Yeah, hi Rachel and hi Jessie, it’s great to be here. I am a PhD student at the University of Greenwich and I’m researching urban sanctuary practices in London, specifically how different actors work together to make London a place where people who have moved across borders and now settled in the UK feel welcome and feel like they belong. Before the PhD, I worked for a few different charities, conducting and commissioning research projects. During this time, I worked on a project which included families with ‘no recourse to public funds’ - that’s a visa condition that excludes people from most welfare support. This project really made me aware of the injustices that people with insecure immigration status face, and I became interested in understanding how different people and organisations seek to bring about change.
Rachel: Thanks Franca. I’ll briefly introduce myself. I’m a sociologist and ethnographer based at UCL. I research motherhood, and how government policies, insecure immigration statuses, financial precarity, and spaces and places impact on mothers’ personal relationships following migration to the UK, and how all of these things affect how mothers access and share different kinds of support. And I recently published a book called Precarious Motherhood, which is free to download at UCL Press!
So, how does space shape how we form friendly relationships? Franca?
Franca: In my research, I was initially interested in city space and how sanctuary manifests in the city, so in a way I was trying to find a fixed place, like a spot on the map that we could call a ‘place of sanctuary’. To find these places of sanctuary, I asked the people who took part in my research, who had experienced precarious immigration status, to draw a map of the places that they frequent in their everyday lives and attach emotions to the different places. And through this method, called emotional mapping, which I’ll talk more about in a different episode of this podcast, I realised that it’s impossible to find a fixed place of sanctuary. Instead of drawing places, many people drew their family, their partner or friends, which showed how it is really relationships with people that matter. But place is still important because it facilitates relationships. So many people, for instance, mentioned that living in a large city with good transport links meant they were able to see friends and family easily. Some also mentioned how being in an area that is racially diverse offered a level of protection from street-level racism. As one of my participants said: ‘This area, it's safe for people to seek sanctuary because it's, let me say it's... Mixed people live here.’
Rachel: I agree - like you, I’ve seen how certain places and spaces can provide a sense of safety and protection for people experiencing intersecting forms of oppression. So for example places like advice centres, adult learning classes, faith organisations or children’s centres can play an important role as safe, welcoming spaces. Eric Klinenberg and others have conceptualised these kinds of spaces as ‘social infrastructure’, which I find really helpful. I’m interested in how places facilitate regular interactions, which encourages connections and builds trust - with staff, volunteers and other mothers for example, and this can help create a sense of belonging. I’ve been especially interested in how this can facilitate the formation of friendships over time. This seems to happen in places where people can mobilise different aspects of their identity, like being a mother of young children, or being from a particular country or region, or maybe belonging to a particular faith group. On the other hand, I’ve been reflecting with Hannah Grondelaers at the University of Ghent, about the constraints of living in shared domestic spaces such as housing in multiple occupancy, or a reception centre, as was the case for the families in Hannah’s study. Spaces like these can be cramped, with limited privacy - so social infrastructure can be especially important in this context. But having said that - I should point out that social infrastructures are not always or inherently straightforward spaces of belonging. Making connections and seeking and sharing support can still be difficult. I found that mothers need to navigate tensions within these spaces. Maybe we can come back to this later. Jessie, what are your thoughts about how spaces shape friendly relationships?
Jessie: Yeah, thank you so much for that question, Rachel, and thank you guys so much for your thoughts on this. I really liked your idea about social infrastructure, Rachel, and I’ll build on that a bit to talk about the idea of people as infrastructure. But first I’d just like to lay out a little bit about what’s happening in the context of Amman, Jordan. So there’s so many different refugee populations in Jordan, including people from Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan. And actually, the majority of the population of Jordan have some familial ties to Palestine, so it’s a super diverse environment, and all those people have slightly different access to different forms of welfare and institutional support. So, only a couple of people can really hide their refugee status, other people can blend in to the rest of the population in Amman, but particularly Black people, those from Somalia, Sudan and other places in Africa, are pretty immediately visible and assumed to be refugees in Amman, and so therefore they’re easier to exploit, and they’re subject to a lot of racism and discrimination. So that really impacts how people experience friendly spaces and really just spaces in general. So one of my interlocutors, one of my research participants, Ismail, who is a Sudanese refugee, said, ‘Because of the culture of [in] reality exploitation, discrimination and racism and the other things that I mentioned, I really don’t see myself belonging to this place any more.’ So that’s a pretty strong statement saying that he doesn’t feel comfortable in this city really at all. In response to that feeling of not belonging, other Sudanese refugees have created their own spaces where they can be safe and exchange information and knowledge and just spend time with each other. So there’s some Sudanese cafes in downtown Amman that are really popular to Sudanese and other African people where people go to chill and they can play games, they talk about the exhausting issues that they face, and they help each other in whatever ways they can. So, tying back to the idea of people as infrastructure, that’s an idea coined by scholar Abdou Maliq Simone – so it’s the idea that if you see the same person for example every day in the same place, that that person is just as important to your experience as the space is. So the person is a part of the infrastructure. So my participants might feel excluded and a lack of belonging because of the exploitation and discrimination that they face in public space, which is also people as infrastructure creating that discrimination, but they have also carved out and created other spaces for themselves in other places.
Rachel: Thanks Jessie, that’s a really important observation. Can we think a bit more then about how people’s precarious statuses affect how they develop friendships or friendly relationships within these spaces? Franca?
Franca: It’s been really fascinating listening to you, Jessie. So one thing that really surprised me when I spoke to a participant is when she said that she felt more comfortable telling professionals about personal experiences, particularly about her immigration status, rather than her friends. And she said it was the ongoing nature of friendships that meant that she didn’t know if her friends would end up sharing that information with others in the future or gossip about her status. Here is what she said: ‘I am sharing stories with you. And you hear it and you do whatever you want with it and that’s fine. But with my friends, you know, friends, they all can be genuine but at the same time, if they meet others, they might tell them what’s happening with me.’ I found it interesting that she said she finds it easier to interact and share her experiences with professionals. Some others also mentioned finding it easier to share their stories in purpose-driven spaces, so for example in a community group for people with no recourse to public funds. The reason for this is that there is a common understanding of the situation that one is in, meaning there is less of a need to explain oneself and less of a fear of being judged by others because everyone in some way is in the same boat.
Rachel: Thanks Franca - this very much resonates with my research findings. I found that the tension that we all experience in friendships between the need for self-disclosure and the need for privacy is especially tricky for mothers with insecure immigration status. Asking for help, or even just getting to know a person, usually means sharing some personal information. But opening up creates risks and can make you vulnerable - like you said, people might gossip about you, or exploit you. In my research, I found that even in largely supportive spaces, mothers tended to be cautious when forming connections with other people. As one of my participants said, ‘[At church] there are some nice people, a lot of nice people, but, I don’t know! You have to be careful as well. Somebody that goes to church might not be a good person. You have to be careful who you talk to, be careful who you disclose your personal issues to.’
As in your research, Franca, it seemed to me that in places that were mainly accessed by people with precarious statuses, there was a sort of tacit understanding or mutual recognition of this precarity, which helped mothers to feel comfortable and safe. And again, reflecting your findings, Franca, some mothers told me they chose to share sensitive information with professionals rather than with friends - partly to avoid the risks I mentioned, and partly for pragmatic reasons, feeling that particular professionals were better positioned to provide the help or the resources they needed.
Friends can definitely be an important source of emotional support. But as I found in my work with Hannah, this didn’t necessarily mean deep mutual confiding. Confiding can be problematic for people who are precariously positioned. And we found that mothers were more likely to share emotional support just through ‘being there’, knowing your friends are there for you. So Jessie, what were your findings about navigating this tension between privacy and self-disclosure?
Jessie: Yeah, both of your points are so interesting. I’m seeing that people are really careful about what they reveal and who they reveal it to, and definitely there’s a lot of commonalities between what you’ve both said and what my interlocutors told me. So in Jordan my research participants spoke about maintaining their privacy and not disclosing their refugee status for so many different reasons. So some people would adopt a Jordanian accent when they were out shopping or when they went to job interviews, or they would avoid gatherings of big groups so that it wouldn’t get back to people in their home countries that they were in Jordan. Others would try to hide their nationality from their landlords because they were afraid of being exploited, which was a real possibility that others explained to me that they had experienced. So some of those choices happen in the public space, in shops and on the street, and others happen in private space. So you see the spectrum of how people feel they need to be private and not self-disclose.
In relation there’s this other term that I want to bring in, called conviviality, which is a way that people exist in space regardless of their differences. That doesn’t mean that there is no friction, there’s still racism, there’s still sexism, there’s still discrimination, but people can live together in more or less harmony without even necessarily acknowledging those differences, it becomes so banal that people are different and they’re diverse. So in Jordan, one example of a convivial space in Amman is this roundabout in the centre of town, which is where a lot of refugees and forced migrants in Amman spend time, there’s really not that many green spaces, so these roundabouts are really spaces of meeting in the city. And particularly in the evening, it’s a really convivial space, where people are selling items of food from carts, and they’re selling games for children, families hang out, and my interlocutors spoke often about finding peace there amongst this kind of chaotic urban landscape. That even just being proximate, being near other people relaxing and hanging out and having friendly interactions gave them a deep sense of peace and belonging. So that
example shows how spending time in some specific urban spaces is a really positive experience, in contrast to what I was talking about before, Black refugees experiencing quite intense racism and discrimination in the city.
Rachel: Thanks Jessie. So what would you say is the role of professional spaces, like charities, in enabling relationships and providing support? Jessie?
Jessie: Yeah, I’m really happy to talk about this because I worked with a lot of NGOs, non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations, kind of smaller grassroots organisations in Amman. These spaces are really necessary for refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants. So my interlocutors spoke about them really frequently. They talked especially about difficult and discriminatory experiences that they had with the UNHCR, which is the UN refugee agency. And then they spoke positively about experiences they had with grassroots organisations. At some of those really big charities, particularly the big international ones in Jordan, they really replicate forms of bordering. They need refugees to prove that they’re refugees, bring in their paperwork, come constantly, answer phone calls, you know, prove that they are needing this specific kind of aid. Versus smaller grassroots places don’t need you to register, they just take anybody who comes. And in that way they also facilitate kind of a more convivial community bonding experience because you don’t have to prove you’re a specific nationality - any nationality can come and use these services. So as I mentioned I worked with a lot of these small grassroots organisations that really prioritised creating community for their beneficiaries, and then their beneficiaries spoke very often about the community that they were able to build in those spaces.
It’s also really important to critique the overall system at play here. The state as well as like international governments has pushed people to the periphery in Amman and has made it nearly impossible to get the things they need, even things like money for rent, food, access to work. So it’s important that we have these organisations filling these gaps, these really essential gaps, but we also need to question why we’re in a situation where refugees and asylum seekers are so marginalised that there’s this like massive industry has been created to support them. My interlocutors were really attuned to these dynamics, and constantly questioned why they were stuck in this situation and they kind of blamed the government of Jordan or the UNHCR or even went as far as to blame the United States. So for example, one of my interlocutors, Muhammad, who was a Syrian refugee, said: ‘It’s sure they [UNHCR] get the benefit. How they survive? How the employees increase their lives. Because of our disaster, right. If there are no refugees, no employees will work. No organisations will work. They depend on us.’
Franca: It’s so interesting to hear what you’re saying, Jessie, because your context in Jordan is of course quite different from mine in the UK, but I’ve actually made some similar observations. So, third sector organisations, which is what I refer to, and that includes charities, civil society organisations and NGOs in the UK, are I would say in a somewhat contradictory position. So on the one hand, their immediate relief, as Jessie already said, through providing people with a warm meal, material items, emergency accommodation or emergency funds, it’s really necessary for people’s survival, but their role in providing these services can also be problematic. So people in my research spoke about some charities being life-savers because they provide unbureaucratic access to support, and that’s particularly the case in comparison to the council. But charities aren’t devoid of power dynamics, so similar to what Jessie was saying, some charities expect gratitude or they require people to fall into a certain category, like they have to be asylum seekers, or they have to have a certain nationality, and that then of course limits people from accessing the support that they need.
Rachel: Yes, that’s interesting, because similarly I found that professional spaces can be really important for mothers but also can be problematic too. Professionals with specialist knowledge, for example people working in healthcare, child development, legal advice, or social services - can be a crucial source of advice, advocacy, or information, or practical support, and caring practices. But charitable organisations are often precariously positioned themselves, with short-term funding, part-time staff, a reliance on volunteers, and the risk for staff and volunteers of ‘burnout’. And as you mentioned, Franca, power dynamics do exist within organisations, including charities. Mothers may have to navigate certain kinds of ‘gatekeeping’ practices, whether these are part of official processes or less visible.
So, why do you think it’s important to pay attention to these power dynamics within charitable spaces and grassroots organisations? Franca?
Franca: Yeah so what I found really interesting in my research, and what made a big difference for the people that I spoke to, was in how far a charity space would enable relationship building. What I mean by that is in how far spaces helped people to meet others in a similar situation. So, many of the participants in my research were part of a campaigning group organised by a charity. And one person I spoke to who is part of that group mentioned that because the group also has space for informal conversations, it has enabled her to connect with others and exchange items and practise solidarity in this way. This campaigning group generally tried to incorporate participatory elements into their work, and created campaigns together with people who are affected by hostile immigration policies. Decisions are usually discussed in a group, people can get involved in creating materials like posters for their campaigns and there is always a joint lunch at the end of every session. This means people can express themselves in the ways that feel most authentic to them - they aren’t expected to use professional vocabulary for example. And that’s different in other charity spaces that I’ve observed which maybe are a bit more bureaucratic, or where meeting formats are more rigid, and that makes it then more difficult for people to become involved in their natural ways.
Rachel: Thanks Franca. And how about you, Jessie?
Jessie: Yeah that’s great to hear that people are really encouraged to be like a part of these decision-making processes. I want to bring in like a different kind of level to the question, which is that NGOs, especially in the context of large forms of displacement, they can really impact city level governance and particularly can shape cities through processes of gentrification. So for example in Amman the large NGOs have really exacerbated hierarchies in employment by bringing in ‘expat’ workers, who then receive much higher salaries than local people, and at the same time most refugees can’t even work for those organisations, because refugees aren’t allowed to work in Jordan. So refugees aren’t able to give their opinion on their policies and practices. There’s also a policy from the Jordanian government bureaucracy that keeps refugee-led organisations from registering which means that refugees don’t get to be a part of decision-making for policies that are about them.
Rachel: And that can exacerbate feelings of exclusion and non-belonging, I imagine.
So, now our last question for today. How might your work be useful in policy and practice? Jessie.
Jessie: This really leads on from what we were just talking about. Actually, academics have been really key to creating policies regarding refugee responses, particularly in Jordan. So in 2016 the EU and Jordan signed this compact called the Jordan Compact which was meant to turn the Syrian refugee crisis into a development opportunity, by giving Syrian refugees specifically, no other refugee groups, access to employment by offering work permits. It also did a couple of other things like facilitate special economic zones and started trying to get women into household employment and register their household businesses. And in so many different ways the Jordan Compact failed, partially because it didn’t include refugee voices. So when refugees were starting to be encouraged to take these jobs at factories in special economic zones, people didn’t want to do it because the pay was really low, it was really far away to travel, so those kinds of on-the-ground experiences should have informed the policy before it even got made at that level. So it’s really important to include migrants in these decisions because migrants are really key members of our cities and cities like Amman that have experienced a lot of displacement. These kinds of policies can create big changes to the physical environment, so we need to be sure that before those policies are enacted, migrants’ lived experiences have been considered.
Rachel: Thanks Jessie. Franca, how about you, how do you feel your work could be useful in policy and practice?
Franca: Yes, I couldn’t echo what Jessie said more, in terms of making sure that the voices of people who have crossed international borders and who have precarious status are represented in decisions that are made. In terms of how spaces shape friendships and sharing support, I hope that my research will inform the practices of organisations who work with people with precarious immigration status. These organisations do vital work in a really difficult context, but this also means that they are sometimes reproducing the context and the very things they are against - like victimising people who have migrated, or limiting their ability to connect with others. So I’ve been working with two organisations for my research and now that I am coming to the end of my PhD, I hope that my findings will inform their work, especially when it comes to ensuring that the spaces that they create allow people to make these important connections we have been speaking about.
Rachel: I agree - organisations which work with and support people experiencing precarious migration do amazing and crucial work. But I also think it’s really important for staff and volunteers to reflect on how it feels for people to come into that space, to form connections, and ask for help. Does it feel like a welcoming, friendly and supportive space? Is there someone to talk to? And how can power dynamics be minimised? What can the organisation do to help facilitate friendship formation among people accessing the space?
So let’s try and pull some threads together! While there are some clear differences in the contexts of our research, especially between yours on the one hand, Jessie, and mine and Franca’s on the other, what’s been really striking from our discussion, I think, is the similarities in what forced or precarious migration means for people in relation to finding and creating safe and supportive spaces.
Jessie: Yeah, thank you so much Rachel, I definitely see a lot in common between our research. And it’s really wonderful that we’re all working in solidarity with people with precarious migration backgrounds. It’s really important to find and create safe and supportive places for everyone, and particularly for people with these precarious statuses. We’re seeing this really big demonisation of migrants across the board and I think it’s really important to step back and say we stand in solidarity with people who are experiencing these different kinds of violence at the hands of our leaders and policies that have really negative impacts on people’s lives, which is really what we’re all bringing to the table, the information that we’ve found by speaking with our research participants. So I’m from the US and right now we’re seeing this big mobilisation of ICE raids that are coming into our communities and abducting people, maybe who have immigration statuses but maybe who don’t. This super-authoritarian crackdown is because of decades of demonisation of migrants and of people who cross borders. That they can now be so emboldened to use such violence and such illegal methods is really scary, it’s really scary that we’re here already, I think people didn’t expect things to get so bad so fast. But honestly as researchers, I think we’ve been warning, it’s really important to work together to stop these forms of precaritization, in a way. I think we really need to stand hand in hand with migrants and with people with precarious migration backgrounds and say we welcome everyone into our cities, build systems where we support people.
Franca: I fully agree with Jessie that we need to situate our research within the broader context. And there are bigger forces like what you mentioned, growing authoritarianism, capitalism, and colonial legacies, which we see in our everyday and in migrants’ everyday, and these creep into all spaces. But I do think we see a lot of resistance at small scale and in people’s everyday - like solidarity practices of sharing items with each other - and these small acts of solidarity really give me hope that there is a different future that’s possible.
Rachel: Jessie and Franca, thank you both so much for reflecting on some of your research findings with me today. And thank you to our listeners! This is the first mini-series of Between Borders, and we would really like to hear from you. Please do use the short feedback form in the episode notes to tell us what you liked, what we could improve, and what you’d like to hear more of. And please do get in touch if you’d like to discuss today’s topic with us. Thank you for listening. Please join us for the next episode of Between Borders!