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Organizer:
Institute of Social Anthropology
Entangled Lives: The Everyday Experience of African Asylum Seekers in Hong Kong (MA Project)
If you would like to join the Zoom session, please contact s.burri@unibas.ch.
Over the last twenty years, Hong Kong has become a favoured destination for asylum seekers from across the world. The city state has lax entry and visa requirements and is relatively easily accessible for most nationalities. People seeking refuge in Hong Kong are often perceived as an economic threat and granted only an absolute minimum of humanitarian protection and assistance. The government has repeatedly reiterated that it strictly refuses to grant asylum or to assess the refugee status of anyone. Based on (participant) observation and semi-structured interviews conducted during fieldwork in Hong Kong, this thesis examines how Hong Kong's strict asylum regime shapes the everyday experience of African asylum seekers. As a consequence of seeking asylum, people experience their lives through bureaucratic entanglement with a regime that attempts to exclude them from citizenship in a totalitarian way. But the everyday reality of African asylum seekers goes beyond this regime. Even though their lives are intricately enmeshed with the rules and regulations, they are never fully controlled by the asylum system. African asylum seekers remain producers of their own lives, actively finding ways to make a living, negotiating their feeling of home, and creating new perspectives while they wait.
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