Young people seeking asylum: voice and activism in a ‘hostile environment’

This chapter sets out the grassroots activism of a group of four young people aged 24 to 29 who were seeking asylum in the UK during the hostile environment. Moving away from normative definitions of political participation as the formal activities of citizens, the work drew upon second wave feminist and Classical Marxist understandings of collective action. The chapter argues that by ‘speaking bitterness’ and creating ‘language from below’ in order to craft a play to dramaturgically depict their lived realities, the young people formed collective action and did politics ‘differently’. They engaged in biographically-meaningful, ‘personal-political’ and ‘political-personal’ activism that focused on the particular needs of their wider group. They also made ‘democracy anew’ by practicing democracy informally and in alternative, co-equal, meaningful and purposeful ways, within a hostile environment that ‘others’ them and alienates them from political and social participation.