Responding to the needs of refugees and asylum seekers in the context of Covid19 - resilience, adaptation, and new forms of care

This project explores the needs of refugees and asylum-seekers in Glasgow, Scotland and in Newcastle-Gateshead, in the North-East of England, in the context of COVID-19. We focus on these cities because they are key points of dispersal with established asylum service infrastructures spanning distinctive national contexts. We will investigate and compare both the response of organisations who provide services for refugees and asylum-seekers, as well as the lived experiences of refugees and asylum-seekers in the context of a global pandemic in Scotland and England. This will build upon five pilot interviews undertaken with refugees in Newcastle-Gateshead during the COVID-19 pandemic. This will facilitate a cross-national, cross-city account of the lived resilience, adaptation strategies and new forms of care that have emerged in the two cities, that can inform local and national government policy. A UK wide survey will provide a crucial overview of the impact of COVID-19 on asylum-seekers and on asylum services. This will be conducted as the start of the study and again six months after this in order to assess how the sector is responding to the unfolding situation. Twenty interviews with organisations who provide services for refugees and asylum-seekers (10 in each city) will supplement forty interviews with refugees and asylum-seekers (20 in each city). Outputs from this project include three academic journal articles; two research reports and two linked policy workshops/webinars in Westminster and Holyrood; two plain language open access online articles about the research findings; and an animated video.