BEING TOGETHER:
URBAN ENCOUNTERS, QUIET POLITICS AND EMOTIONAL CITIZENRY
Kye ASKINS
University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, Kye.Askins@glasgow.ac.uk
This paper offers reflections on research exploring encounters between refugees and
asylum seekers (R/AS) and longer term residents in a befriending scheme in the city
of Newcastle, north east England. Focussing on the emotional geographies of these
intercultural interactions, enacted in and produced through everyday urban spaces, I
suggest that meaningful encounters, which change values, shift presumptions and
‘translate beyond the specifics of the individual moment’ (Valentine 2008) emerge in
fragile yet hopeful ways. Contact in the befriending scheme involves a complex
interplay of positive and negative emotions and difficult negotiations of difference,
which opens up the potential of/for recognising similarities and connections, and
through which nuanced relationships develop and dualisms are destabilised
(British/asylum seeker; tolerant/tolerated; care giver/care receiver). I argue that these
emotional encounters evidence a ‘quiet politics’ among R/AS and longer term
residents, centred around (re)making society at the local level: they are not fleeting
moments of shared public space, nor prosaic interactions of workplace or education;
these are explicit relationships in which a political will to engagement is enacted,
reflecting a desire for more open and inclusive notions of belonging and citizenship.
Such ‘emotional citizenry’ contributes to developing understandings of relational
citizenship that is ‘already practised’ by people across space and time, not a fixed
entity owned by some and not others, or a status to be achieved in the future
(Horschelmann and El Refaie 2013). Emotional citizenry is, rather, grounded in the
complexities of places, lives, feelings and meanings.