Photovoice accounts of borders and home: Asylum seeker and refugee perspectives

The UK continues to see increasingly restrictive and repressive immigration policies aiming to secure the imagined nation and its citizens, who can claim a genuine right to belong. Underpinning these policies and modes of bordering is a statist framework of governance where relational encounters underpinning belonging and home are ordered hierarchically. The presumption is that legal, temporal and spatial forms of belonging take priority over other emotional and intimate forms of attachment. This article presents findings from a photovoice project carried out in collaboration with people from the asylum seeker and refugee population in the North West of England, and focuses on two themes drawn out of the photographs: bordering and home. The visual methodology was valuable because the photographs made visible often invisible borders such as racism. It was also valuable because participants represented their subjective experiences of the border and relationships with home and belonging, which highlighted the fluid, messy, multiple and contested nature of these relationships. Moreover, it was not possible to order their relationships with different ‘homes’/places hierarchically. Therefore, participants’ self-representations undermine the limited way statist approaches to bordering understand belonging and home.