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Paper short abstract:

This proposal examines how asylum seeking mothers put into practice ordinary acts of creation and imagination to ensure the wellbeing of their children, and argues the role fantasy, pleasure, and invention play in making well in sites of precarious living.

Paper long abstract:

Like a contemporary dystopian remake of ‘’Life is Beautiful’’ (Benigni, 1997), mothers in the British asylum system use a mixture of imagination, creativity and play to create a sense of normality for their children within very uncertain and precarious experiences of the home. Repeatedly deemed unsuitable for people seeking refugee protection, asylum accommodation impacts on many aspects of its residents' physical and mental health and wellbeing, but also witnesses moments of enjoyment and fun. This paper draws on fourteen months of ethnographic research on the experiences of motherhood among women residing in asylum accommodation in London to examine how mothers put into practice imaginative acts that amuse and nurture their children beyond the health impacts of asylum politics. Concerned by their children’s deteriorating health and determined to ensure they are well in an all-encompassing sense of the word, mothers engage in imaginative games and resourceful endeavours to generate alternative realities, hoping to shield them from the dystopian effects of politically induced legal and material precarity. Entanglements between people’s health and the asylum housing environment urge us to rethink the ways in which we approach the notion of well-being as a biosocial phenomenon in sites of precarious living and prompts us to interrogate the role fantasy, invention, and pleasure play in making well. I argue that in their efforts to make homes more affirming places for their children, mothers’ ordinary and often improvised acts of imagination and creation contribute to making other worlds possible and lives worth living.