The Body and Embodied Experiences in the British Asylum System: Developing a Conceptual Perspective
The Body and Embodied Experiences in the British Asylum System: Developing a Conceptual Perspective

Author(s): Rebecca Mavin
Subject(s): Politics, Geography, Regional studies, Governance, Sociology, Social Theory, Migration Studies
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: UK; migration; British asylum system; the body; governance; autonomy; Asylum Politics;
Summary/Abstract: Claiming asylum or humanitarian protection is fundamentally a legal process. In the UK, individuals present a case to the Home Office outlining the reasons that they require protection, and submit to a bureaucratic process in which their eligibility is determined. For asylum seekers, however, this process is a lived experience: their encounter with the state does not only affect their legal status, but structures their experiences of ‘space, time, personhood, collectivity, and embodied subjectivity.’ (Willen, 2007: 2) For the state, asylum has exceeded its humanitarian connotations and become connected to considerations about security (Huysmans, 2007), access to territory and resources (Gibney, 2004), and the preservation of national identity and values (Boswell, 2002). Untethered from notions of human rights, asylum has become a deeply political issue.

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