Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the emotional labour revealed when integration is approached as a lived practice. I offer an analysis of how 'New Scots' compromise, negotiate, perform and adapt themselves across everyday encounters, within a societal context underpinned by a welcome-unwelcome dialectic.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the emotional labour revealed when integration is approached as a lived practice, rather than a policy objective. With a focus on better understanding the 'micrology of life' (O'Neill, 2020) I argue that the experiences of asylum-seeking 'New Scots' are framed not just by one but two, often opposing, national narratives about Britishness and Scottishness. Akin to Khosravi's 'hostile hospitality' (2009), I suggest that a 'welcome-unwelcome dialetic' (Evans, 2020) is being played out at a political as well as local level. In light of this, I offer an analysis of how individuals compromise, negotiate, perform and adapt themselves across everyday encounters as a way making oneself legible (Cummings, 2016) to those perceived to have the power to judge one's efforts at integrating. Moreover, I draw attention to the consequences that can occur when individuals present an unwelcome performance, as well as how a sense of integration can be abruptly interrupted by public actors. I suggest that emotional and 'empathic labour' (Cummings) is not just undertaken for the sake of an audience but is part of a set of 'reactions and patterns of resistance' (Scott, 1990) that operate as a means of ensuring individual dignity and survival, and as a way of bearing a form of representational burden (Mercer, 1990). Finally, I position hope as a form of labour being actively worked at and (re)produced by individuals within the asylum system, not solely as a means of looking towards the future but as an integral form of self-preservation within the present.