'Hope and Asylum': The Latest in LNUCC's New '(Con)Current Events' Series

On 20 November, LNUCC hosted a seminar and roundtable to launch the new multi-author volume, Hope and Asylum: Everyday Life, Precarity and Social Change (Routledge 2025), which is co-written by Concurrences member Torun Elsrud, Philip Lalander, Marcus Herz and Jesper Andreasson. A longitudinal study drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Sweden, the book foregrounds the precarity and suffering, as well as the forms of agency, experienced by those negotiating the asylum process, and pays particular attention to how hope emerges and functions in diverse ways under these conditions. Titled 'Hope and Asylum' in honour of the volume, the first part of the event began with a seminar presentation from Torun and Philip, who talked us through the full scope of the project, and closed with reflections on the text from guest speaker Irene Molina, Professor of Human Geography at Uppsala University. The seminar was followed by a roundtable discussion and audience Q & A, with Concurrences member Åsa Trulsson as chair.

Throughout the afternoon, conversations were dynamic, generative and engaging, and we were delighted to be joined by a number of guests via zoom. 'Hope and Asylum' is the second and latest installment in a new strand of the LNUCC seminar programme titled (Con)Current Events'. In this series, we examine pressing contemporary concerns, examining how our histories of colonisation and their active legacies continue to shape the world in which we live.