Location, Movement and Memory: an Ethnographic study of journeys of asylum seekers and refugees from sub-Saharan Africa into Europe and North East England.

Abstract

This thesis consists of an ethnographic study of asylum seekers and refugees arriving in North East England from sub-Saharan Africa. The ethnography is created by focussing on the life stories of four individuals known to the author. The information gathered is the result of participant observation in the African community on Teesside over a period of ten years. The study is further developed by focussing on one informant in particular.
The author engages critically with Gregory Bateson’s theory of double-bind and this becomes the grounded theory for the study. The author reflects on her own experience as a migrant from South Africa to the United Kingdom. This auto-ethnography explains some of the author’s knowledge, experience and commitments and alerts the reader to possible hermeneutical bias. Further depth is added to the study by the author’s report on her own journey (undertaken with the support of a Churchill Trust travelling scholarship) from the refugee camp in Kakuma (northern Kenya) to Cairo, Tripoli and Malta; and by her accounts of social events in the asylum seeker and refugee community on Teesside.
The author identifies a number of important factors in relation to sustaining personal identity in the face of traumatic experiences and forced relocation: memory, language, food, belief and hope. These factors are explored in the relevant literature. The implications of these factors for successful integration into the host community, and the tensions to which they give rise, are explored.
It is hoped that this study might help the local host community to better understand the experiences and priorities of asylum seekers and refugees arriving on Teesside and that it might also help to inform local government policy regarding how they are treated. This will become increasingly important as larger numbers of asylum seekers and refugees arrive. The study will need to be broadened to encourage the experiences of Syrian refugees (the largest group currently arriving in Teesside).