Bewogen gezinnen: een feministische etnografie van de trajecten van gezinnen door het Belgische asielregime

Summary Over the past decades, asylum has become an enduring and deeply embedded feature of societies across EU-Europe. Among those applying for protection are many families with children, whose lives unfold within and around protracted asylum procedures, often after having spent years on the move. At the same time, the notion of 'family' itself has become a site of normative contestation within European asylum regimes, where certain family structures or practices are used to exclude or racialize families as culturally deviant "Others." This dissertation engages with these dynamics by taking the lived experiences and relational practices of families as a central lens through which to understand families' experiences of living with asylum. The dissertation analyses the affective and embodied processes of seeking access to protection and legal status in EU-Europe from the perspective of families - foregrounding care, interdependency, and private life as key to understanding how asylum is lived, negotiated, and resisted. The guiding research question is: How do families live with and co-produce the border regime throughout their asylum trajectories in Belgium, and what social worlds emerge in the process? Based on a follow-along ethnography of families navigating the Belgian asylum regime, the dissertation documents the lifeworld of asylum from their perspective, as they move through the multiple geographical and institutional sites that constitute this regime, in search of protection, care and stability. I carried out fieldwork in two large-scale asylum centres in Flanders, from where I accompanied families through the various phases of their asylum procedure: from their initial stay in the reception centres ("camps"), to eventual relocation into private housing, or into legal precarity, under return and deportation orders. Methodologically, I co-created knowledges through a diverse range of interactions with families, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, home visits, cooking and eating, and "doing paperwork" together, in on/offline contexts. I analysed these fieldnotes, interview transcripts, and other materials through a hermeneutic, interpretive approach. While scholarship on border regimes has increased, including ethnographies focusing on migrant subjectivity, this dissertation argues that a more sustained attention is needed to the domains of care, family, and the private sphere, as well as to how these are entangled with broader power structures. I show that these private domains are not peripheral to the asylum experience, but central to understanding how the regime functions and is reproduced. To this end, I draw on migration and border regime theories, feminist scholarship on care, relationality and the everyday, as well as on anthropology of the state and law. The dissertation develops key insights along three themes: Trajectories: families' trajectories through the asylum system are shaped by multiple forms of im/mobility - legal, spatial, and temporal - that are overlapping, multidirectional and messy, and, moreover, always embedded in intimate, relational lives. Asylum trajectories are lived and understood relationally, as families confront imposed waithood and forced mobilities through mutual care and the circulation of knowledge. Asylum and the Politics of Protection: families navigate and contest the legal-bureaucratic machinery that governs their lives - by raising critical questions about who is deemed eligible for protection, under what conditions, and through which forms of recognition. Families actively engage with the workings of the regime, through a combination of complying with, appropriating and contesting the imposed categorisation of the asylum regime, drawing on situated, embodied knowledges of what it means to live with the border regime. Family as a normative construct: dominant moralizing discourses about "the family" are mobilized by various actors in the asylum regime to govern, racialize and stratify intimate relationships. Yet, families also strategically inhabit or contest these ideals in their negotiations for inclusion, including in the face of deportability. The dissertation makes two key contributions. The first contribution is theoretical and epistemological. Building on and extending regime theory and the Autonomy of Migration approach, the dissertation argues for a feminist reconceptualization of the subject in (critical) migration studies - not as an isolated (often male) individual confronting the border regime, but as an embodied human being, always embedded in webs of interdependency, care and social reproduction, that both sustain families and mediate their encounters with state power. This epistemological perspective, moreover, insists that we must theorize acts of care, solidarity, and resistance that occur in private sphere, not as outside of the regime, but as part of how asylum regimes are negotiated, contested, and co-produced. The second key contribution builds on these feminist, theoretical reconceptualizations to advance a conceptual and empirical rethinking of asylum, not merely as a temporary legal status, but as a prolonged, relational process - an extraordinary affective, and embodied condition that regiments families' life trajectories, and inscribes itself into the intimate fabric of everyday life. More than merely passing through the asylum regime, families live with and within it, often for years. This condition of living with asylum, moreover, produces a particular social world that is characterized, on the one hand, by the powerful presence of law and policy, technologies of governance, discourses and documents governing families' daily lives, bodies, and intimacies, and, on the other hands, by everyday acts of struggle, meaning-making, and resistance, that generate spaces of liveability, care and solidarity, despite otherwise hostile circumstances.