A new special issue of Critical Social Policy co-edited by Professor Tracey Reynolds, is out now.
Abstract
This article presents personal stories from a participatory biographical arts-based study with a specific category of racialised migrants: individuals seeking asylum, in the North East of England. Responding to the important questions posed by this special issue, the article explores individual experiences of navigating the UK's hostile environment with a focus on the threefold punitive ‘threat’ of dispersal, detention, and destitution (Bloch and Schuster, 2005). Adopting an intersectional lens, the discussion highlights the impact of such policies and their compound effect of creating (un)safe and exclusionary everyday spaces, while also outlining the potential for resistance as illustrated by participants’ actions and their creative (re)actions as part of the study's arts-based approach.
This special issue critically examines the far-reaching effect of the UK's ‘hostile environment’, a series of ‘brutal policies’ (Liberty 2018: 4) and legislative measures, implemented by the Conservative Government including the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts, but rooted in earlier political responses to immigration and forced migration, by the Labour government under Blair's leadership and the Coalition government's ‘hostile environment working party’ supported by Theresa May (as then Home Secretary) and translated into policies to control UK immigration (O’Neill et al., 2019, 131). Liberty describe the ‘hostile environment’ as “ a sprawling web of immigration controls embedded in the heart of our public services and communities” (Liberty 2018: 5) and that these policies amount to state sanctioned discrimination and flout human rights laws (Liberty 2018: 50).
Read the full issue here: Critical Social Policy - Volume 44, Number 2, May 01, 2024 (sagepub.com)
Professor Tracey Reynolds is Professor of Social Sciences and Associate Dean for Research and Knowledge Exchange, and Director of the Institute for Inclusive Communities and Environments, University of Greenwich. Tracey’s research areas focus on Black and racialised migrant families and communities. She has conducted extensive empirical research in the UK across a range of social issues including black and minority ethnic families living in disadvantaged communities, and comparative studies of families in the Caribbean and North America. Her teaching at the University of Greenwich, are in the areas of family studies and family policy.