Art, Asylum and Alienhood: Narrative Inequality in the UK Asylum Process

Abstract (English)

Following the tradition of Critical Border Studies, recognising borders as spaces of subjugation and
transformation, not simply geographic ‘facts’. This thesis investigated the UK asylum system through observations of
asylum appeals, co-interrogated the asylum process with people going through it via workshops centred on
displaced knowledge, and through the creation of exhibited artworks disseminated this knowledge.
By interrogating citizenship, borders and narrative inequality, this arts-based methodology revealed the asylum
process as a continuation of colonial practices that created a narrative inequality between the person seeking
asylum and the nation-state. This colonial practice devalues the person’s narrative and uses this inequality to
classify the person into a subject that the nation-state can choose to remove or to assimilate.
Arts-based methods enabled counter-narratives, allowing people to revalue their desires as central to
interrogating the violence of the asylum process that they experience. By centring alienhood, and the desires of
those subjected to alienhood, the findings of this research point to the colonial nature of the citizenship system
itself. Within this system, asylum is a further tool of subjugation, and as such another border, that is relabelled
as humanitarian through the monopoly of justice by the nation-state. The desires each person expressed in their
art revealed the dissonance between their lived experience and the human rights protections supposedly at the
heart of the asylum system. A system professing to champion human rights but often unable or unwilling to
uphold them. The desires expressed in this project unlock questions of future alternative justices, and alternative
governance, that have profound implications for how we understand the asylum system and the people
subjected to it.