Belonging-Assemblage: Experiences of Unaccompanied Young People Seeking Asylum in the UK

Abstract

In this article, I examine how belonging takes place within lives shaped by the hostile milieu of UK immigration policies and politics, by focusing on the everyday experiences of unaccompanied young people seeking asylum. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage, I suggest an understanding of belonging as a rhizomatic assemblage, comprising the interactions and relations of diverse forces and flows. Based on the analysis of in-depth interviews with unaccompanied young people and the professionals who care for or work with them, I conclude that belonging is reconfigured in-between relations, always incomplete and in transition. I argue that belonging is characterised by inconsistencies and ruptures and made possible by the ‘micro-politics’ of those unaccompanied young people encounter in their everyday lives. I contribute to the literature by conceptualising the sociological notion of belonging in a novel way and exposing its key components and nature formed under precarious conditions.