Lisa Goodson

Problem or Opportunity? Asylum Seekers, Refugees, Employment and Social Exclusion in Deprived Urban Areas

The UK has become a leading proponent of European restrictionalism and has focused its efforts on developing policy that excludes asylum seekers from mainstream society. Dispersal policy has focused upon sending asylum seekers to excluded urban areas where there is an excess of available housing. This paper discusses the potential impacts of this approach on the economic prosperity and social cohesion of UK dispersal areas and focuses specifically on new migrants who arrived under the NASS dispersal programme. It demonstrates that, whilst newly arrived asylum seekers and refugees (ASRs) have both skills and qualifications, they are currently experiencing high levels of unemployment and those who are employed are working in low-skilled jobs with earnings far below the average. The paper contends that the high levels of unemployment and underemployment currently experienced by ASRs may serve to exclude them from society in dispersal areas and in so doing exacerbate the general levels of social exclusion in those areas. It is argued that ASRs could offer new opportunities for deprived areas if initiatives were introduced to help them access work commensurate with their skills and qualifications.

Researching Migration in a Superdiverse Society: Challenges, Methods, Concerns and Promises

The arrival of superdiversity raises a wide range of methodological issues that warrant further consideration by social researchers conducting research in superdiverse contexts. The complex multi-layering of population settlement that has emerged due to successive waves of migration means that identities, lived experience and access to services including welfare are played out in a plethora of different ways, often determined by the interplay of a range of socio-economic variables alongside structural characteristics, which influence the fundamental rights and entitlements of individuals living in the UK and in turn their settlement and adaptation experiences. This paper reflects on the limitations of ethno-centric research designs, which concentrate on ethnicity as the most important unit of analysis, and calls for more participatory and multidimensional methodologies that engage diverse participants and reflect the levels of socio-demographic complexity experienced in urban areas of society. It then moves on to discuss a number of specific methodological challenges associated with complex populations. In particular sampling and access issues associated with diverse migrant populations will be considered. The latter part of this paper discusses the adoption of a range of research approaches that offer promising potential in terms of better capturing and understanding the heterogeneity, complexity and fluidity concomitant with superdiversity as well as engaging a range of community stakeholders in the production of knowledge.

A Community Research Methodology: Working with New Migrants to Develop a Policy Related Evidence Base

This paper reflects on a community research project aimed at building the capacity of Refugee Community Organisations (RCOs). The project intended to identify and collect a robust and reliable evidence base to equip RCO leaders with the relevant information required to engage in policy lobbying to raise awareness of the barriers faced by refugees when trying to access ESOL and support for mental health issues, education and employment. The main mechanism used to collect evidence was a team of 16 paid community researchers from a range of refugee backgrounds. This paper considers the rationale for adopting a community research approach, the meaning of community research to those involved, as well as the methodological challenges and practical concerns associated with the approach.

Using researcher vignettes to explore co-production in a large diverse team

This chapter responds to Vertovec and Wessendorf’s (2010) call for new methodologies in exploring linguistic and cultural transformations in superdiverse settings by focusing on the potential insights generated by large diverse research teams. To explore the divergent perspectives which emerge from teamwork, we focus on vignettes produced as part of a large Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project exploring multilingualism as a communicative resource across four UK cities (the Translation and Translanguaging [TLANG] project). Vignettes have traditionally been used as a participant-orientated method to elicit reflections (Hughes 1998). In this case, the vignettes were significantly different: they represented researchers’ own accounts of being involved in ethnographic fieldwork. This methodological shift in the application of vignettes was developed by members of TLANG on two earlier projects (e.g. Creese and Blackledge et al. 2015). On the current project, the team comprised a core group of linguists and other scholars at various career stages and with different project roles, as well as key participants (KPs) who were embedded in a range of community settings and who brought experience from various language, socio-cultural and educational backgrounds.