Paper details

Paper authors	Hala El Moussawi
In panel on	Residential trajectories of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers: vulnerabilities, assistance and policies
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Housing is a key dimension to understand the experience of refugees in host societies. While most scholarly work focused on asylum accommodation and its disenfranchising and exclusionary conditions, this paper contributes to a growing literature on refugees’ housing after receiving a protection status, during their transition from state accommodation to private accommodation, or in their continuing housing trajectory in the host society. Based on interviews with twenty households who received a refugee status or subsidiary protection in 2016 in Belgium, it studies the extent to which there is a form of (continued) displacement that materialises along the housing trajectories of refugees. Through the precarity lens and the analysis of the affective dimension of refugees’ lived experiences, it elaborates when, if, and how displacement resurfaces again, using this as window to understand (post) arrival policies and housing provision in Belgium. In doing that, the paper illustrates the kind of dependencies that the system causes, and the resulting actors that come in play as a response to the housing demand.

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