Geographies of asylum, welfare, and the state at the margins

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Over the past decade, the UK's asylum and welfare systems have both been transformed by major organisational changes, funding cuts, and privatisations. Asylum seeker dispersals and the impacts of welfare austerity have become increasingly concentrated in already-impoverished, marginal urban areas. Yet despite these parallels, academic analysis and commentary has tended to consider welfare and border regimes in isolation. My doctoral research addresses this gap by developing an empirically rich, geographical understanding of the everyday practices, performances, and lived experiences of governance that non-citizens and citizens negotiate at the margins.My thesis was based on a year-long ethnographic study conducted at two charity drop-in centres in Rochdale, Greater Manchester: one serving migrant communities, the other non-migrant clientele. Here I was able to detail the parallels and intersections between asylum and welfare governance, observing how both asylum and welfare claimants are subject to analogous disciplinary expressions of sovereign power and systematic exposure to poverty and destitution. I found this hostility to be enabled by the outsourcing of asylum and welfare 'services' to non-governmental actors and the institutionalised 'moral distance' (Gill, 2016) of such bureaucratic arrangements. Additionally, I detail how such hostility and distance is shaped by various 'technical devices' (Barry, 2001; Darling, 2014) and increasing with digitisation. Finally, my thesis draws attention to the everyday acts of solidarity and connection that exist across asylum and welfare systems. By deconstructing statist categorizations of citizenship, the thesis ultimately engages both with critical theories of the state (Mitchell, 1991; Painter, 2006; Jessop, 2016) and literature on the state-led division of populations (Tyler, 2013; Anderson, 2013) to scrutinise boundaries drawn according to immigration status.As the governance of different marginalized groups appears to converge, this thesis asks what the implications of this are for the people and places most-affected by these developments. With a specific concern for the emerging asylum-austerity nexus absent in both political and academic debate, my thesis offers an original scholarly contribution; exploring the diffuse governmental practices and lived experiences that constitute these systems, their intersections, and the state. My work seeks to better understand what happens when the lives of peopled divided by governmental status, but united by marginalization and shared space, meet. Continued relevance of researchI believe that my research remains pertinent for several reasons. Firstly, with the UK potentially on the brink of a cost-of-living crisis for its poorest residents, benefits claimants and asylum seekers alike are set to face increasing hardship as charities face potentially unprecedented demand for their services. Additionally, Universal Credit claimants are once again being targeted by threats of new sanctions as the government seeks to address labour shortages by accelerating a return to work for the unemployed. Meanwhile, as the current government's Nationality and Borders Bill threatens the UK's asylum system with significant upheaval, potentially even halting the reception of asylum seekers in UK territory altogether. This is all taking place during a time in which ongoing conflicts on different continents mean an increase in refugee arrivals to the UK is likely; with this either taking place informally or through government organised programmes (such as the current Afghan citizens resettlement scheme).The fellowship would provide me with the opportunity to enhance the contributions of my PhD research by publishing and disseminating my work to a wider audience, whilst also allowing me to contribute to the scholarly output of the department.