In the broad field of Refugee Studies, and in the activism of Civil Society and NGOs, there is a general commitment to enabling the stories of people who have been forcibly displaced to be told and heard. Working from multiple national, institutional and disciplinary perspectives, this Research Topic will significantly deepen understanding of The Function of Stories in Hostile Asylum Regimes. It will articulate what is at stake when stories are silenced and the political imperative of enabling such stories to be heard.

The proposal arises from a British Academy funded project titled ‘Hostile Environments: Policies, Stories, Responses’. The project brings together academics and activists from four national contexts in which a hostile asylum regime is in operation: the UK, Italy, Canada, and the USA. The purpose of the project has been to compare and contrast policies that underpinned hostile environment regimes in the different contexts and also activist and civil society responses to those policies. A principal starting point for the project’s workshops is the State commitment, in various contexts, to preventing the story of the displaced person from being heard. The proposed essays emerge from those discussions. The special issue will thus analyse both the silencing and also the potential of stories in a hostile environment context in broad political, cultural and historical terms.

Contributions will move from accounts of the way stories are shaped and used by hostile environments, through considerations of the way stories are shared in various activist and civil society contexts, towards more utopian accounts of the way the stories of people seeking refuge could be told and received. Written by a combination of scholars, writers and activists, the essays will be interspersed with short interviews with people with lived experience of hostile environments. Paying due attention to ethical considerations, the interviews will be open, informal dialogues using the following questions as broad prompts: How does the hostile environment affect the way you share your story? Are there stories the hostile environment makes it difficult or impossible to tell? What stories do you wish you could share?

The whole issue will be framed by an extended introduction. Establishing a distinction, which the project considers fundamental, between a person’s ‘case’ and their ‘story’, the introduction will address: the degree to which the Hostile Environment should be considered an international space; the colonial legacy and structural racism of Hostile Environment regimes; the necessary complexity and mutability of the post-traumatic story; the degree to which the requirement to sustain a case (sometimes over many years) can cause people to become alienated from their own stories and therefore from the experiences that constitute their lives.

As a Research Topic within Frontiers in Human Dynamics, the series of essays and interviews will thus significantly deepen understanding of The Function of Stories in Asylum Regimes. The collection will articulate what is stake when the story of the displaced person is silenced, and what can happen politically when such stories are shared.

We acknowledge the funding of the manuscripts published in this Research Topic by the University of Kent. We hereby state publicly that the University of Kent has had no editorial input in articles included in this Research Topic, thus ensuring that all aspects of this Research Topic are evaluated objectively, unbiased by any specific policy or opinion of the University of Kent.

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