Making sense of youth-led social action with, and for, young people from refugee backgrounds

Within Western resettlement countries, leisure has been positioned as a tool for achieving top-down policy goals. Yet, minimal attention has been directed towards understanding how young-forced migrants make sense of and experience leisure within the daily physically, psychologically and socially repressive regulations and processes of the UK asylum system. This novel paper examines how young people from refugee backgrounds engage in and make sense of the leisure domain, social action, whereby individuals and communities seek to generate change on issues that matter to them. The paper draws on a 3-year-long participatory action research (PAR) project in London, UK, seeking to co-develop a leisure-based, youth-led social action programme with, and for, young people from refugee backgrounds. Participant observation was used alongside photo voice methods to explore the young peoples’ entangled motives and meanings of social action. Our findings critically examine the complex ways that young people understood the social action programme in relation to (i) relational and emotional dynamics, and (ii) identity, culture, and religion. These findings offer a new way to thinking about how young forced migrants experience and negotiate leisure amid the migration-welfare nexus.