Precarious Housing, Precarious Belonging: Using Arts-Based Participatory Methods to Explore the Experiences and Perspectives of Young Asylum Seekers Living in Temporary Accommodation.

This paper discusses the role of arts-based methods, including drawings, paintings and graphic visualisations, to produce respectful and representative narratives of young asylum seekers and their experiences of temporary housing in the UK. I adopt a feminist postcolonial framework to discuss the extent to which dominant power dynamics and traditional research practices lead to misrepresentation of the experiences of racialised individuals. I consider the vulnerability of racialised individuals, such as young asylum seekers, to epistemic injustices, particularly hermeneutic injustices. These arise due to cross-cultural terminological and semantical gaps, which are exacerbated by experiencing marginalisation and unequal access to interpretive resources. I hypothesise that such injustices can be navigated using participatory arts-based methods such as visual methods, allowing individuals to share their experiences directly and not only mediated through researchers’ interpretations.