Years in the waiting room: a feminist ethnography of the invisible institutional living spaces of forced displacement

Abstract

Changes in migration patterns, together with a global increase in the “securitization of migration” (Huysmans, 2000), have led to a growing number of people worldwide finding themselves in situations of forced immobility – waiting for indefinite periods of time. Asylum seekers who have sought international protection in a host country, but whose claims for refugee status have not been determined, are often caught up in the uncertainty of such prolonged conditions of displacement (Doná, 2015). Large-scale accommodation in camps and institutional settings provided by governments and humanitarian organisations are often intended as temporary measures to provide for an immediate need for shelter, but many asylum seekers end up in these settings for years. In these liminal spaces, displaced individuals are faced with the challenge of turning shelter into home (Boccagni, this book; see also Szczepanikova, 2012; Van der Horst, 2004; Vandevoordt, 2017). Hyndman and Giles describe in their article, Waiting for what? The feminization of asylum in protracted situations (2011), that asylum seekers on the move are viewed by governments in the global North as a potential liability or even a security threat. State policies aim to immobilise asylum seekers and fix them to place in refugee camps or institutional accommodation centres. In these spaces asylum seekers are feminised by rendering them as “passive, helpless, static” (p. 363) in order to reduce the threat that temporary status poses. While reception or “welcome” centres – as the institutional settings providing shelter for asylum seekers are also referred to – lack the iconic typological characteristics of the refugee camp, these more formal spaces of displacement, together with the experiences of their residents, are less frequently acknowledged and studied (Sanyal, 2019).