Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on un/doing solidarities with ethnography through the lens of participatory co-research. The research focused on how solidarities are imagined and practiced in negotiations of migrant deservingness in the context of dispersal housing for people in the UK asylum system.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on doing and undoing solidarities with ethnography through the lens of participatory co-research conducted on- and off-line during the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of the Migrants and Solidarities project. The research focused on how solidarities are imagined, practiced, and (re)constituted in negotiations of migrant deservingness in the context of dispersal housing for people in the UK asylum system; it took place against a background of overlapping crisis discourses, protracted public sector austerity, and increasingly hostile policies vis-à-vis people seeking asylum. The original project design relied on a relatively conventional ethnographic approach, which had to be abandoned as COVID took hold. In response, and inspired by calls to decolonise ethnography, we adopted a participatory approach, working with a group of six co-researchers who had personal experience of the asylum system. Through our ethnographic practice, we sought to create a space of conviviality and recognition, countering the precarity of people in the asylum system and challenging entrenched inequalities within both conventional anthropological practice and society at large. We found that solidarities, a key concept in the research project, were also enacted in and through the research process as co-researchers shared their stories and group members supported one another. The paper examines the intersections, tensions, and challenges we encountered and worked through during the fieldwork period and beyond, including those of procedural, institutional ethics vs ethics in practice. The paper concludes with reflections on Hage’s call for a politics of co-hoping in times of crisis.