Living within a Broken System 

Merrydith Russell 

Research took place in Plymouth, Devon, in partnership with Devon and Cornwall Refugee Support (DCRS) charity, for a period of 6 months, co-creating workshops with lone male asylum seekers.

Through doctoral studies, I collaborated with Devon and Cornwall Refugee Support, researching homemaking among lone male displacees in Plymouth. While Plymouth is not unique in hosting asylum seekers, it has higher levels of deprivation and poverty than the national average [1], increasing concerns about well-being in an already vulnerable environment. Across the UK, hundreds of organisations support asylum seekers in their pursuit of refugee status, yet the significant variation in policies across the four nations leads to unequal experiences, especially after status is granted. These inconsistencies do not just reflect bureaucratic inefficiency; they point to a system structured to produce inequality. As Daniel Dorling [2] argues, borders function less to ensure safety and more to enforce poverty and exclusion. Likewise, Dorling[3] describes housing inequality not as an oversight, but as something intentionally built into the system. Viewed together, these insights help expose how the asylum process in the UK reinforces systemic barriers even after legal recognition.

This research forms part of a wider inquiry: The Making of Home: a feminist approach to the curatorial practice of object archaeology in the context of forced displacement and domesticity. Central to this is the use of mapping as a method, not just as a tool for spatial analysis, but as a critical, feminist practice of uncovering hidden infrastructures, power relations, and lived experiences. By adopting a locally grounded, practice-led approach, the mapping process becomes a means of illuminating how displaced individuals navigate and negotiate homemaking within oppressive systems, situating personal geographies within broader structures of exclusion and control.

Facilitating a series of creative workshops as part of an artist group residency at The Box one of the largest cultural museums in the Southwest of the UK, co-researchers engaged in map-making techniques to share their journeys of home. These maps, traced and digitally layered, became visual expressions of displacement, memory, and identity. Drawing on Denis Wood’s[4] argument that maps are not neutral representations but political acts that shape reality, these creative mappings served to expose the constructed nature of borders and systems of exclusion. As Wood[5] suggests, lines on a map, borders, zones, and property boundaries often reinforce power and inequality. Yet, aligned with Michel de Certeau’s[6] notion of spatial practice, the act of tracing and mapping in this context becomes a quiet form of resistance, a reclaiming of narrative space. These counter-maps do not speak for co-researchers or the thousands of displaced people across the UK; rather, they interrupt dominant framings, offering space to amplify silenced voices and reimagine belonging beyond imposed boundaries. The co-created maps challenge media rhetoric that misinforms, misleads, and oversimplifies the hostile system in which many are entangled. Offering a glimpse into everyday realities, these maps reveal experiences often overlooked. 

This research explores home, homelands, homemaking[7] and unmaking [8], drawing on Karen Barad’s[9] concept of intra-action through creative mapping. By tracing lived experiences, understood as ‘traumascapes’[10] , this presentation focuses on counter-mapping[11] to reveal layered experiences within and beyond the Home Office. These maps document the experiences of four male co-researchers, highlighting patterns of injustice in the asylum process, such as inconsistencies between authorities, which leads to homelessness[12] and temporal time-scapes becoming elongated, tangled, or paused with no guidance by governing power. However, Woods[13] challenges the objectivity of maps, arguing about the political weighting they hold as map lines fracture borders, property wealth, and zoning of communities; therefore, they are not a depiction of society but are constructed to forge society. Deleuze and Guattari [14] and de Certeau[15] frame the tracing of lines as resistance itself, a way of marking the everyday against rigid structures.  The conceptual framework is captured through lines, paraphrased below, the discussion of lines highlights the threading of substance. In this framing Deleuze and Guattari [16] argue that all social groups and individuals navigate life along three distinct types of lines: These three interwoven lines: a rigid, segmented line defined by clarity, discourse, and structured articulation; a molecular line shaped by ambiguity, silence, and insinuation; and a line of flight, intensive, disruptive, and unrepresentable, where meaning dissolves into pure event. These lines do not remain separate but continually intersect and transform one another [17]. The segmentation of lines in these maps brings into sharper focus both the trauma of displacement and the structural failures of a broken system.

The discussion of line making, marking, and traces is broad; it can be interpreted as a line can be metaphorical, “of crossing the line”, an ethical, moral boundary to a direction. The segment above sets the foundation of the thought within the line of enquiry; the rigid and unclear lines present the legislation put forward in a systematic map by me in collating the legal guidelines of the asylum process. The responses share the molecular lines’ record of lived experience, presenting what individuals see as initial responses to their asylum journey. As a layered map, the lines break free from the original framework to present a counter-narrative.  Throughout this paper, a series of maps will be presented and discussed to explore the impact of counter mapping through traced lines to deeply understand the lived experience of lone asylum males entering the UK. Exploring the landscape in which asylum is understood is largely taken by sociologists, or large organisations that handle statistics such as the Home Office. The ways information is shared and distributed can be vague, misaligned, and make it challenging to understand. When information is not clear, the asylum seeker can become lost and draw opinions and ideas without substance[18] . This form of information can be extremely dangerous and fuels opposition and othering, which can lead to racial terrorism1 as seen in the recent horrific event across the UK, with looting, riots and attacks, moving towards individuals and groups who have been othered due to their skin colour and or religious beliefs[19]. While this debate can go deeper, I propose this as a baseline in understanding why alternative methods of disseminating information need to be evaluated, if not for the language barriers themselves, but because the asylum process construct is not a simple line; indeed, arrival at refugee status involves a maze between points A to B[20].

At its core, counter-mapping represents a dialogic and plural practice, a response to dominant mappings that often erase or obscure marginalised experiences of space[21]. It works not simply by offering alternative representations, but by actively opposing the systems that conventional maps help to sustain[22] .The counter in counter-mapping is not neutral; it is an explicit resistance to structural conditions; in this context, the legal precarity imposed on asylum seekers during their application processes results in restricted access to housing, healthcare, and employment[23].

Abed’s counter-map (see Figure 1) is a compelling example of how minimal representation can still convey deep personal narrative through intra-action[24]. Responding to the map in Figure 3, Abed’s journey appears informative at first glance, however in the long wait of different temporal locations across the UK this map demonstrates an emotional tying. In comparable to Abed second map (Figure 2) through his recounting of repeated cross-country travel for interviews, he highlights the emotional and logistical challenges embedded in the asylum process. His map charts various train stations across the UK, symbolising his lived experience of the country's geography marked with sharp detail, emphasising the tension between long-term uncertainty and the intense stress of short-term experience.

It is important to recognise that space is not necessarily literal to a room but actually exists. For example, the space in which one becomes a refugee may involve a multitude of different physical spaces, such as rooms, detention spaces, hotels, and alternative accommodation, but the period of time to go through these experiences is a space in itself. Countermapping facilitates a space through which individuals can explore personal and collective identities rooted in past experiences[25].  This process helps to articulate desired conditions in the present, such as belonging, security, and identity[26]. As the past often contains experiences of trauma, revisiting it becomes a crucial means of exposing the gaps or fractures in the current fabric of everyday life. These emotional, spatial, and structural discontinuities are not separate from the present; they are intertwined through memory, shaping how space is felt, navigated, and contested today[27]. Countermapping, then, becomes not just an act of resistance, but a form of narrative repair; tracing old lines to make sense of where new ones might be drawn[28].

Tracing this experience through countermapping, layering each on top of one another, opens a dialogue highlighting tropes in experience, where the system does not work, highlighting where and possibly how information is being interpreted. Importantly, these counter maps surface a dialogue of reclaiming ‘land, culture, and situated knowledges’[29] to present voices away from the statistical rhetoric of forcibly displaced communities. Through the mapping generated in a workshop, co-researchers share stories of experience, stepping away from the numerical data favoured by government officials.  

Understanding the landscape  

As a creative practitioner, the information, system, and organisation I was signposted to became extremely confusing. I would overhear conversations about Section 95 or appeals, how some people would receive letters or interviews while others would not. While I am not a case worker (a person who supports asylum cases), it is unfair that I cannot understand the foundations of how the immigration system works, especially when it is such a divisive topic. I quickly became overwhelmed with ‘plug-in’ laws that felt they were randomly put in place, in a changing migration landscape. It felt as if there was one straight road with many road closures looping around neighbouring villages, bypasses, and hidden lanes, causing the journey to fracture to get back onto the main road and then be diverted off again. 

Throughout the workshop interview series, strong relationships were built from advice on grocery shopping locations to sharing useful video links to practice English. The men would tell me stories about their mothers, their children and families, cooking together during the everyday. While most of the decisions were seen in a positive light, there were moments of hurt and frustration, while not directly, the sentence structure and tone would change; it was clear within the conversation around the Home Office journey, the group were exhausted with the waiting time, frustrated with the lack of clarity. Specifically, when the questionnaire had been introduced to some and not all, there was a forced layer of othering.

Figure 1 is a high-level flow diagram often shared with asylum applicants and the broader public to explain the Home Office processing system. The given timeframes will be discussed later, but more importantly, this diagram does not show the external factors, such as legal challenges, delays, and common barriers within the process. It is also extremely difficult to source this diagram in alternative languages; therefore, in Figure 2, the design has been translated into the three most spoken languages within the group, Farsi, Pashto, and Arabic. The central line from arrival to status/ decision upheld, once an asylum seeker has been given refugee status, is completely different, with very different support streams. 

The circular motion around the sections is where an individual could be ‘stuck’ for a period of time, and could move back and forth. For example, after the screening interview, many different stages can be met with no clear information of what that means for the individual. Figure 1 counter maps the home office legislation by graphically demonstrating the crossing of lines, the unclear ‘system’, and how it flows. Importantly, this is only one side of the Home Office’s system as this is the average experience for a lone adult male, meaning they entered by themselves with no family in the UK, over the age of 18. If the individual is a single parent or a pregnant woman, then the process would be different again. Some academics, such as Nick Gill[30] and Anna Tuckett[31] ,would argue the Home Office complicates the framework to generate an overtly complex process, leaving individuals waiting, consequently encouraging a hostile environment towards others.  

Response

Living within an unclear and often overwhelming legislative system, many individuals rely on secondary sources, typically third-sector charities for guidance and clarity when navigating their asylum cases. All co-researchers participating in this project were, at the time of the creative workshop interviews, still awaiting an official response from the Home Office, a critical moment where individuals are assessed for eligibility for refugee status.

The mapping exercise offered a space for co-researchers to begin threading their individual journeys into a shared narrative. It allowed for the emergence of patterns and personal timelines, giving form to otherwise fragmented experiences. Framing this exercise within the co-researchers' current realities was crucial: these were lives suspended in bureaucratic limbo, shaped by the temporality of waiting.

In Figure 2, one co-researcher charts essential survival milestones such as “my bank card has been sent”, which the diagram estimates occurred between 25 and 45 days into the process. Around day 70, the co-researcher was relocated from temporary accommodation in Buckingham (a hotel), to Folkestone, specifically to Napier Barracks. This site has been under ongoing scrutiny; in 2021, the High Court ruled its conditions were unlawful. The barracks are now scheduled to close officially in September 2025[32].

While these diagrammatic lines visualise the duration of life in temporary space, the stories shared through the map's creation revealed something more nuanced, identified as moments of homemaking. Through images and memories of friendship, culinary exchange, and the first time the co-researcher heard his native language spoken again, the map captured moments of connection, resilience, and hope within experiences of deep isolation.

Towards the end of the linear map there is a marker, just a few millimetres of ink representing weeks of uncertainty; the arrival of an interview letter. As Mosa explains:

They send you an email and a letter from the post, but yeah, you could check the whole thing on the government and that’s where it's translated. It says that if you're from Iran, and you came here from 28th June 2022 to 27th of March 2023 you will get a questionnaire[33]

This questionnaire was a newly introduced step. At the time of the interview, it remained unclear whether it would act as a substitute for the formal interview or serve as a preliminary stage, further reinforcing the opacity of the process. Ultimately, the mapping exercise demonstrated the value of creativity as a method for knowledge-sharing. It offered co-researchers agency in how their stories were represented, allowing them to prioritise what they felt was meaningful. Without these maps, such memories risk being lost, dislocated and absorbed into a temporal silo of space and time.

Figure 5. Response to Understanding Refugee and Asylum process in the UK (2023- 2024). By Mosa Najafi. 

In Figure 3, the co-researchers express extensive gratitude to the Bangladeshi and British government, which challenges me more as a British citizen who knows his experience of homelessness on the streets of Plymouth. In statements such as, ‘I have not filed case in any other country’, offers insight to the level of anxiety and expression of vulnerability; he is forced into a fear that he may be deported to another country or not have the right to claim asylum in the UK. While there is more to unpack in this argument, especially in public-facing research, as a researcher, I feel uncomfortable with Latiff’s expression of gratitude. He endured long periods of waiting, an ineffective processing system, and ultimately homelessness. This raises important questions about the power dynamics between researchers and individuals from vulnerable communities. I believe this gratitude is unnecessary and instead reflects a colonial dynamic that positions the researcher as oppressor. Within this map there is a sense of home making through a dreamt reality, mentioning his hopes for his family to come to Plymouth and his children to go to school at Plymouth College, knowing the co-researchers as I do, this is where he attended ESOL English lessons, and there is a sense of foreboding hope for them to reunite

The map above (Figure 6) presents multiple voices layered together, highlighting a shared experience. The current model is struggling to provide a clear and fairly assessed processing system. Individuals are being moved across the country due to a lack of regional infrastructure, which only serves to re-dislocate them from any form of familiarity, such as contact with others who speak the same language, thereby exacerbating the isolation these men are being forced to endure.

There are clear inconsistencies in the timeframes when compared with the Home Office’s suggested timeline (see Figure 1). During these extreme waiting periods, we can observe changes in the system for some community members, but not for others. Alternatively, grouping practices appear to shift when more infrastructure becomes available. While this may reflect an adaptation of the system to meet the demands of individuals currently within it, the absence of clear communication further reinforces how opaque the process is, not only for asylum seekers, but also for third-sector organisations and others trying to offer support.

Returning to Deleuze and Guattari[34], segmenting the lines shared within these maps intensifies the traumatic stories of displacement and the injustices of a broken system. Figure 4 heightens the stark reality further with additional markings, doodles and native calligraphy marks; these lines expand and interlace, sharing an entangled trauma showing repetitive mistreatment, which sadly oversimplifies each person’s lived experience. The creative act of mapping honours individual agency and autonomy, it is not to be misrecognised as simply a tool of recording information but an embodied process of recognising the conscious, unconscious experiences and memories of horrific trauma within these lines. Consequently, these lines disrupt the colonial power and ignite dreams of futures[35].

Figures

1.       Response to Understanding Refugee and Asylum process in the UK (2023- 2024). By Abed Ashrafi

2.       Mapping his journey around the United Kingdom, by Abed Ashrafi.

3.       UK Visas and Immigration and Home Office, Asylum Accommodation Support Transformation: Policy Equality Statement, image/diagram titled “[Insert Exact Title or Description Here],” last updated September 8, 2020, GOV.UK, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/asylum-accommodatoin-support-transformation-policy-equality-statement/asylum-accommodation-support-transformation-policy-equality-statement.

4.       Understanding Refugee and Asylum process in the UK (2023- 2024). By Merrydith Russell. 

5.        Response to Understanding Refugee and Asylum process in the UK (2023- 2024). By Mosa Najafi. 

6.       Response to Understanding Refugee and Asylum process in the UK (2023- 2024). By Latif Khogyani. 

7.       Layering of Understanding Refugee and Asylum process in the UK (2023- 2024). By Mosa Najafi, Latif Khogyani, Matin Ahirad, Abed Ashrafi and Merrydith Russell.  

Endnotes

[1] World Population Review, “Plymouth Population 2024,” accessed July 16, 2025, https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/plymouth-population.

[2] Dorling, Daniel. Borders: Why They Are Not Working and What We Should Do About It? London: Verso, 2021.

[3] Dorling, Daniel. All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster. London: Allen Lane, 2014.

[4]  Wood, Denis. Rethinking the Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press, 2010.

[5]  Ibid.

[6] de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

[7] Boccagni, Paolo. “Home, Homelands, Homemaking and Unmaking,” Journal Name, 2017.

[8] Baxter, Vanessa, and Katherine Brickell. “For Home Unmaking.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 5 (2014): 834–51.

[9] Barad, Karen. “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning,” Duke University Press, 2008.

[10] Lazarenko, Anastasiia. “‘Traumascapes’: Conceptualising the Spatiality of Trauma,” Journal Name, 2020.

[11] Campos-Delgado, Ana. Counter-mapping Experiences. 2018.

[12] Kiddey, Rachel. Homelessness and the Asylum Process. 2017.

[13] Wood, Denis. Rethinking the Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press, 2010.

[14] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp. 197–198.

[15] de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

[16] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp. 197–198.

[17] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp. 197–198.

[18] Hynes, Patricia, et al. “Not Clear Information Leads to Misunderstandings in the Asylum Process,” Refugee Studies Centre, 2007.

[19] Boukaria, Yara, and Devi Devakumar. “Far-right Riots in the UK: The Culmination of Years of Rhetoric and Policies,” The Lancet 403, no. 104

[20] Ibid.

[21]   Biggs, Sara. “Counter-mapping Marginalized Spaces.” Journal of Mapping Studies 5, no. 1 (2011): 44–58.

[22] Springett, J., et al. “Critical Cartographies: The Counter in Counter-Mapping.” Geographical Review 95, no. 3 (2005): 367–87

 [23] House of Commons Library. “Asylum Seekers: The Permission to Work Policy.” London: House of Commons Library, 2025.

[24] Barad, Karen. “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning,” Duke University Press, 2008.

[25] Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] De Nardi, Marco. Narrative Repair through Countermapping. Cultural Geographies 26, no. 1 (2019): 39–54.

[29] Cohen, Ruth, and Duggan, Sarah. Reclaiming Land, Culture, and Situated Knowledges. Critical Geographies 34, no. 1 (2021): 25.

[30] Nick Gill, “Pathologies of Migrant Place-Making: The Case of Polish Migrants to the UK,” Environment and Planning A 42, no. 5 (2010): 1157–76, https://doi.org/10.1068/a42219.

 [31] Anna Tuckett, Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

 [32] “Napier Barracks: The Inhumane Reality an In-Depth Report of the Experiences of Men Held in Quasi-Detention at Napier Barracks 2 Napier Barracks: The Inhumane Reality.” n.d. https://www.jrsuk.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/JRS-UK-Report_Napier-Barracks-the-inhumane-reality_March-2023_WEB.pdf.

 [33] A workshop interview with Mosa Najafi by Merrydith Russell, The Box Plymouth, (December, 2022).

 [34] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp. 197–198.

[35] Arthur Saniotis and Farahnaz Sobhanian, “Polemics of Healing: Storytelling, Refugees and Futures,” Journal of Futures Studies 12, no. 4 (May 2008): 1–8.