Hope and Asylum

Torun Elsrud, PhD and associate professor in sociology, is a senior lecturer in social work at Linnaeus University. Employing longitudinal ethnographic methods, her research focuses on critical social work, migration, asylum, informal solidarity networks, bureaucratic violence, racism and gender. She is co-author of Hope and Asylum: Everyday Life, Precarity and Social Change (Routledge, 2025). 

Philip Lalander, PhD in sociology, is a professor in social work at Linnaeus University. His main research interests concern critical social work, youth culture, longitudinal ethnographic methods, phenomenology/symbolic interactionism, migration, racism, and everyday life. He has also engaged in studies about the use of drugs and criminality, and is co-author of Hope and Asylum: Everyday Life, Precarity and Social Change (Routledge, 2025). 

Title
Hope and Asylum

Abstract
This event centres on issues examined in the volume Hope and Asylum: Everyday Life, Precarity and Social Change (Routledge, 2025), co-authored by Torun Elsrud, Philip Lalander, Jesper Andreasson and Marcus Herz. This book applies perspectives of hope to understand the precariousness, suffering, and agency of people seeking asylum. With attention to the restrictions and austerity politics that have characterised public policy following the significant rise in asylum applications in 2015, it draws on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in the Swedish asylum context, together with data collected in other European countries, to explore how the circumstances of those navigating asylum processes evolve and connect to their notions of hope and the future. Departing from the ambiguities and fragility surrounding hope in the asylum context, Hope and Asylum analyses people’s lived experiences and their navigation of uncertainty and precariousness during the migration process. While hope can provide individuals with support and empowerment, it can also cause pain and be exploited by authorities to control and disempower. The book argues that critically scrutinising current asylum regimes and exposing the enduring emotional and embodied scars they inflict through the bureaucratic violence of welfare states is essential for mobilising efforts toward social justice and human rights. 

The seminar will be held in English. 

Please register if you want to participate via Zoom. 

Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies