Agency through strategy: a qualitative study of asylum seekers’ experiences of asylum accommodation in Glasgow

Affordable and appropriate accommodation is a necessity for the integration of asylum seekers; however, the centralised asylum accommodation provision in the UK is exclusionary. It has been a mechanism to exclude asylum seekers from others within their new community, keep them under the state’s control, cast them as undeserving people, and force them to live in difficult circumstances. For asylum seekers, asylum accommodation has served as a daily reminder of temporariness and uncertainty that can hinder them in their quest to effectively settle and prosper. Using data drawn from interviews conducted with 16 asylum seekers and 14 refugees (the latter who have navigated the UK asylum process) living in Glasgow – a city that receives the largest number of asylum seekers and is also the largest dispersal location in the UK (Mulvey, 2015; Strang, Baillot and Mignard, 2017) – this paper explains how asylum accommodation creates spatial and social challenges to integration in asylum seekers’ everyday lives and how they negotiate these challenges. By examining their everyday practices, various strategies are identified that they use to enable them to exert agency within the asylum accommodation system. This research illustrates how asylum seekers living together within shared spaces in Glasgow create social connections and attach meanings to their asylum accommodation. They build strong social connections to exert agency to navigate through the hostile asylum accommodation in Glasgow. In exercising agency in this way, asylum seekers defy negative stereotyping of forced migrants as inactive and passive and offer a conduit to critiquing the asylum accommodation provision and processes in the UK.