Restless justice : Asylum, homelessness and volunteering

Abstract

Amid the global migration crisis, the UK has created an increasingly hostile environment for people seeking asylum that has pushed many into unnecessary hardship and homelessness. This book offers a politically engaged ethnographic account of emergency night shelters for refused male asylum seekers and refugees in Manchester, UK. The shelters are operated by the Boaz Trust, a local faith-based organisation, and are located in churches across the city. They are at once sites of displacement, on the fringes of public life and society while also being focal points of community activity formed in response to the injustices of the UK asylum system. This ethnography firstly offers insight into the day-to-day lives of the men who stayed in the shelters as they experience homelessness and legal and social uncertainty on account of their immigration status. It argues that a weaponised time sits alongside dispersal, denial and destitution as a key pillar of the UK asylum system. These serve less as deterrents and more as forms of punishment for the very act of seeking sanctuary in the UK. The book also turns to the Boaz Trust and the volunteers who work in the shelters. It suggests that the organisation and churches are not merely service providers but also offer a faith-based counternarrative to the inhumanity of the asylum system. They are putting into practice a ‘restless justice’ through everyday acts of care and love, at a community level, in the face of often cruel national policy.