The politics of embodied encounters in asylum seeking

The research concerns embodied encounters between asylum seekers, the migration regime, and societies that host refugees. The project is divided into three tasks: analysis of European Union and Finnish asylum policies, the study of encounters in asylum application process, and an ethnographic study of experiences of personhood in everyday encounters. Embodied political presence is studied as an asset that asylum seekers have when encountering migration governance that often seeks to reduce them into manageable bodies. The research draws from philosophical anthropology with an understanding of human corporeality as a duality of objective and subjective embodiment embedded in reflexivity. In practical terms, we look into the potential of corporeality as an interface between political subjectivity and agency that may be consequential for improved dialogue with host societies. The project will increase our understanding of the political dynamism of asylum and refuge.