Family-life, difference and practices of citizenship. A longitudinal ethnography on families’ experiences in the Belgian and Dutch asylum regime

This research investigates how families are living with and navigating the asylum procedure in Belgium – within “camps” and beyond – in order to shine light on the affective, embodied process of seeking access to legal status. The monograph is based on a longitudinal, follow-along ethnography of families’ trajectories through the asylum regime in Belgium. It follows a number of families throughout the various phases of their asylum procedure: from their initial stay in the reception centres (“camps”), into the new homes families moved into, or until they received a negative decision and are regimented by return/deportation measures. Through the conceptual framework of the “border regime” (Hess, 2012; Tsianos & Karakayali, 2010) or “migration regime” (Eule et al., 2019), it analyses the workings of the asylum regime, as they manifest themselves in the everyday, including in the private realm. Moreover, it explores how, at different times throughout families’ asylum trajectories, particular normative constructions of the family are mobilized within encounters in the migration regime to determine access to legal status, rights or benefits.

The dissertation is divided in three parts, that each contain various chapters. Part I – TRAJECTORIES analyses families’ temporal-spatial trajectories after “arrival”, and unravels how various – often conflated – im/mobilities are experienced by families moving through geographical, institutional and social-imaginative sites during their asylum procedure. The chapters pay particular attention to documents and how these have become objects of affect that symbolize particular “milestones” of the asylum procedure. The chapters show how families’ trajectories at times overlap with, diverge from or clash with the linear phases of the asylum procedures as laid down in policy models, creating the experience of a “messy trajectories” – with periods of protracted waiting, accelerations and cyclical movement. These particular temporal-spatial constellations of power, produced through the workings of the asylum regime, create affective and embodied experiences, that often clash with the temporalities of families’ life courses.

PART II – REGIMES zooms in on the negotiations at the heart of asylum: the legal-institutional and bureaucratic assemblages surrounding the decision-making on who needs protection. The chapters focus on two particular cases – the case of families travelling onward with already an asylum status in Southern European countries, and the case of Palestinian families who are confronted with sudden changes in asylum policies. These cases aptly demonstrate the spill-over effect of asylum’s institutional logics, laws and policies in the everyday lives of families; negotiations in courtrooms and policy briefs actually produce intimate social realities. Moreover, the narratives of my participants reveal the disconnections between the institutional narratives on “mobility” and “protection”, and the processes of meaning-making of families involved, who rather understand the asylum procedure as arbitrary.

Part III – Normativities about the Family takes an explicit focus on the normative construction of the family, analysing how, at different times throughout their asylum trajectories, families are confronted with normative understandings of who can be considered (part of their) family, and, subsequently, who can benefit from protection or rights through these kinship ties. I demonstrate how various actors delineate the family differently from time to time, based on legal assumptions, but also on performed, everyday understanding of the family that actors, when confronted with from close by, seek to protect. I demonstrate how these normative construction come to be crucial in determining access to legal status, or its counterpart – deportation.

In Conclusion, this dissertation seeks to formulate a feminist critique on the Autonomy of Migration approach  more broadly, and the regime concept in particular, it makes an epistemological move away from an isolated (male) subject confronting the border regime in its most violent expressions, and instead reconceptualize those on the move as embedded in meaningful relationalities – webs of care and interdependency that are simultaneously affected by, as well as drawn upon to circumvented the intrusion of state power, making living with the asylum/border regime a particular subjective and affective condition.

Finally, I formulate a feminist critique on the epistemological premises of the isolated (male) subject in migration research, and instead reconceptualize those on the move as embedded in meaningful relationalities and interdependency that are simultaneously affected by, as well as drawn upon to circumvented the intrusion of state power