Care in Dispersal: An Ethnography into Community-led Migrant Solidarity Organisations in Glasgow

The UK policy context shaped by the hostile environment, asylum dispersal, and retreat from welfare government has led increasing numbers of community organisations to step in to provide care and support for asylum seekers and refugees pushed outside nation-state's ambit of care and highlighted the "politics of care" that reinforce hierarchies and power relations between those who have the power to care and those presented as in need of care, compassion, and benevolence. My doctoral research investigates this "politics of care" in Glasgow which is a major dispersal site in the UK and imbued with tensions arising out of the UK and Scottish Government's diverging approaches in terms of refugee integration. It draws on in-depth interviews with ethnographic fieldwork in community-led migrant solidarity organisations to illuminate how politics of care is enacted in and through spaces of care, how those spaces can be transformed through emergent relationships, and how the policy context can feed into these processes. Sociological studies have so far well-documented the integrative role migrant solidarity organisations play, but these studies were often devoid of migrant perspective and a conceptual framework situating local solidarities within established structures of power and domination. My research aims to address this gap by exploring care relations through an analysis of racial hierarchies and colonial hegemonies inherent in humanitarian care. The main contribution of this study is in scholarship on critical humanitarianism by developing a postcolonial critique of humanitarianism as a means to examine the specificities of migrant solidarity organisations in Glasgow, but, it can also inform migration-focused advocacy groups and policy-makers by promoting public discussion on building and sustaining inclusive communities.