Dreaming in Frozen Time: Desires and Imaginings of Work Among Asylum-Seeking Women in the UK

Ong, Amandas

There has been a wealth of social science scholarship offering insight on how people and communities forced into marginalisation may experience or respond to time in a rigidly neoliberal, bureaucratised world order (Bear 2014; Khosravi 2017; Mains 2007; Nielsen 2014; Ramsay 2020). The majority of asylum seekers in the UK face huge restrictions on their right to work, which leaves them economically dependent on the state, and therefore held in an indeterminate place shaped by waiting and trepidation. Amidst lifeworlds that are defined by seemingly carceral bordering practices (Guma et al 2023; Yazici 2024), instability resulting from volatile policy shifts and the capitalist governmentality of dispersing forced migrants at random across the country (Darling 2011, 2016), the idea of work becomes a proxy for dreams and desires around moral agency and a good life.

In this paper, I delve into my ethnographic fieldwork with asylum-seeking women across the UK to examine how their aspirations and dreams of different types of labour -- waged or otherwise -- may be read as a type of practical magic that enables them not just to survive, but also push back against the threat of being in constant legal limbo, which impedes their ability to build lives and futures in their communities. I argue that the administrative liminality that my interlocutors experience while awaiting asylum may be bleak and violent, but it is also fertile: my paper considers how asylum-seeking women carve out emotional landscapes around the concept of work despite primarily being barred from pursuing it, or systematically undervalued where they are granted permission to work. In doing so, I show that limbo can be recast as a space where ways of being, acting and establishing the visibility of the self are made possible.