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"I'm not happy but I'm okay": how asylum seekers manage talk about difficulties in their host country.

journal contribution
posted on 2014-12-19, 13:08 authored by Simon Goodman, Shani Burke, Helen Liebling, Daniel Zadasa
ABSTRACT This paper addresses the ways in which asylum seekers in the UK manage making complaints about their host country. The authors demonstrate that asylum seekers have fled dangerous situations in their countries of origin and then can face difficulties and hostility in the UK. A discursive psychological approach is used to assess the ways in which asylum seekers made complaints regarding their treatment. Interviews were conducted in a refugee centre in the Midlands with nine asylum seekers and were transcribed for a discourse analysis to be conducted. Analysis of the data showed that participants criticised the asylum system for being unfair. They also made claims about not being happy in the UK, but did so in ways that downgraded the problem so as to manage the possible dilemma of appearing ungrateful and undermining their reasons for claiming asylum. The problems associated with these strategies are discussed.

Funding

The project is funded by the Richard Benjamin Trust [grant number 1106].

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Critical Discourse Studies

Volume

11

Issue

1

Pages

19 - 34 (17)

Citation

GOODMAN, S. ... et al, 2014. "I'm not happy but I'm okay": how asylum seekers manage talk about difficulties in their host country. Critical Discourse Studies, 11 (1), pp. 19 - 34.

Publisher

© Taylor and Francis

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This article is closed access.

Language

  • en

Location

United Kingdom