Paper short abstract:

Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork at a Danish asylum centre, this paper will show how doubt (in both its transitive and intransitive senses), mistrust and uncertainty connect and structure asylum seekers' understanding of the asylum system as well as their strategies in navigating it.

Paper long abstract:

The determination of asylum cases in Denmark ostensibly rests on the authoritative rationalities of law, country of origin information, and medical and linguistic examinations - the steady bureaucratic practices of the sovereign state. the And yet, the production and management of doubt play key roles in caseworkers' resolution of asylum claims, as many decisions fundamentally hinge on a judgement of the applicants' credibility. In this transitive sense, doubt is at once a property and product of the asylum system and shades in to mistrust.

To asylum seekers, however, the asylum process appears a haphazard and uncertain enterprise, feeding doubt in its intransitive sense. For them, uncertainty inflects every part of their experience of the asylum period - not least their meetings with the authorities sitting in judgement on them, whose mistrust they are keenly aware of. Anxiety also arises from the sense that their everyday experiences as well as the anecdotes in circulation at the asylum centres jar with the system's self-presentation as rational and impersonal. Here, asylum seekers' doubts feed back in to the judicial resolution of their cases, and can at times become self-defeating, as when asylum seekers' attempts at making their narratives more convincing instead make them seem less credible to caseworkers.

Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork at a Danish asylum centre, this paper will show how doubt (in both its transitive and intransitive senses), mistrust and uncertainty connect and structure asylum seekers' understanding of the asylum system as well as their strategies in navigating it.