Home-city Spaces of Care
Photo credit: Rebekka Hölzle
Full project title: Home-city spaces of care: Networks of solidarity and belonging for refugees and asylum seekers in London and beyond.
Project overview
The overall aim of this research is to understand and document experiences and strategies of urban homemaking and networks of care with people seeking asylum and refugees in London in the context of a hostile migration regime, entrenched racism and an ongoing cost-of-living ‘crisis'. It will work collaboratively with refugee and asylum-seeking participants and two arts-based refugee charities - Stories & Supper and Phosphoros Theatre - to produce knowledge and resources for researchers, activists, civic-organisations, and policymakers to challenge and mitigate the effects of the repressive migration system and foster solidarity and belonging. Conceptually, the project aims to develop and advance frameworks for understanding the meanings, practices and experiences of care in the city for people affected by displacement that move beyond Eurocentric conceptualisations and categories. Empirically, it will critically explore the role of collaborative and arts-based approaches for: i) fostering fuller understandings of (im)provisional urban dwelling and care; and ii) informing future interventions and policies to support refugees and people seeking asylum as part of a radically care-full ethics of welcome and solidarity.
Aims
These aims shape the following objectives to:
- Co-develop creative interventions (through workshops and creative outputs) with a group of refugees and people seeking asylum to explore, map and document practices and experiences of home, care and solidarity in London.
- Co-develop targeted events with research participants and partners to share new knowledge and understandings of home-city spaces of care among refugees and people seeking asylum.
- Co-produce tangible resources including a printed and downloadable toolkit/pamphlet/zine for refugees and people seeking asylum, practitioners and policymakers; and a set of online resources for wider publics.
- Build a strong network of researchers, activists, civic-organisations and creative practitioners to share knowledge and best practice as part of wider agenda to: a) challenge dominant narratives and policies around asylum/ refugee reception; b) critically explore and showcase how creative practice can support forced migrants and the communities in which they live; and c) bridge empirical/conceptual gaps between researchers, practitioners and public-policy professionals.
- Disseminate findings widely within and beyond the academy throughout the project.
Partners and people
The project is a collaboration between Dr Olivia Sheringham (Senior Lecturer, Geography, Birkbeck), Stories & Supper and Phosphoros Theatre.
Stories & Supper is based in the London borough of Waltham Forest. It uses storytelling and food-related activities and events with the threefold aims to: challenge prevailing stigmatising narratives surrounding refugees and migration in the UK; reduce isolation among marginalised refugees/asylum seekers; and create connections between refugees/asylum seekers and local communities. Central to its practice is the belief that refugees/asylum seekers are the experts on their own experiences of migration, as it seeks to foreground their stories both in workshops, which bring together refugees/asylum seekers and local residents who volunteer with the project, and at public facing events such as exhibitions, story cafes and festival performances.
Phosphoros Theatre is a nationally touring theatre company and registered charity. Since 2015 they have worked with current and former unaccompanied asylum-seeking children to make socially engaged performance work for mainstream theatre. They deliver drama workshops to refugee groups, schools and professionals in London and beyond.
Project Academic Mentor: Professor Cathy McIlwaine, Kings College London.
Funded by a British Academy/Wolfson Fellowship (2024-2026)
Research design
- Creative and participatory workshops: A series of creative workshops with refugees and people seeking asylum to understand and document ‘home-city spaces of care’ in London. The workshops will involve creative activities (e.g. mapping, storytelling and theatre-making) shaped around themes of home, belonging, solidarity and care in the city.
- Weekend research residential: An intensive weekend of workshops in a residential centre outside London to develop activities and themes from the workshops and to determine resources to be taken forward.
- Engagement/knowledge exchange activities with wider publics: Targeted participatory activities aimed at sharing knowledge with wider publics.
- Resources for uncertain futures: This stage involves the development and production of tangible resources/toolkits to be shared widely with organisations and practitioners working with refugees and people seeking asylum.
Planned outputs and resources
- Events/performances in local schools, museums, festivals, community organisations.
- Academic publications including a book and two-three co-authored journal articles on methodological and conceptual aspects of the research.
- Tangible resources for schools/activists/policymakers/museums.
Project updates
- We’ve completed the creative workshop phase which culminated in a beautiful weekend residential workshop in an environmental centre in the Kent countryside. Read our blog about the residential.
- The workshop coordinators also came together to discuss the project design and role of care in collaboration and creative engagements with refugees and people seeking asylum. You can listen to the discussion in this podcast.
- In May 2025, Olivia co-hosted a workshop with PhD student Rebekka Hölzle. The creative workshop explored care as concept, method and practice in the context of migration and solidarity. You can read a blog about the workshop.
- During Refugee Week in June 2025, we co-hosted a workshop at Birkbeck in collaboration with Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Theatre to use theatre games and creative storytelling to 'explore what it means to make home in displacement and hostility and how we might imagine and build collective care within our cities and beyond.’
- In July 2025, we delivered a workshop at the 1st Anniversary of the Fusion Fields Housing Co-op in Coin Street, London. Drawing on the themes of our project, the workshop was about alternative modes of making home and creating radical modes of caring in the city.
- In collaboration with Little Red Hen films, we have made a film about the residential and wider films of the project. This will be screening at the Migrant Connections festival on Saturday 27 September. It will also be shown at St Mary’s church in Walthamstow on the evening of Saturday 27 September as part of an event organised by Stories & Supper. Book tickets for this event. We will have a screening at Birkbeck on Monday 10 November. You can book tickets for this event.
- We have produced a short book drawing on the activities from the creative workshops.