Disorientation and asylum-seeking youth: examining the emotional and embodied impacts of the UK asylum system

Disorientation is a critical emotional and embodied dimension in the slow violence of the UK government’s asylum policies. This paper focuses on young asylum seekers in Newcastle-Gateshead, UK and examines their everyday experiences of the “politics of disorientation”. We demonstrate how the effects of overlapping bordering practices can result in dynamic disorientations that ebb and flow but nevertheless endure in the lifeworld of asylum seekers. First, we highlight how the enforced dispersal of asylum seekers around the UK can trigger multi-layered feelings of disorientation. Dispersal destabilises orientation to space, relations with others, bodies, and life directions, triggering what we call dispersal disorientation. Second, we argue that asylum policy can impede key aspects of the transition to adulthood for young asylum seekers, contributing to intense feelings of disorientation. Finally, we examine how asylum seekers carry out reorientation work through their everyday strategies, alongside the support of voluntary and community groups.