‘My name is not asylum seeker!’ is a pop-up exhibition that focuses on the everyday lives and experiences of people who have sought asylum in the UK. It features material that has been developed between a group of six co-researchers with personal experience of the asylum system who worked with Prof Mette Louise Berg and Dr Eve Dickson (UCL) during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2021. For more information about the research, see here.

The exhibition challenges dominant and dehumanising narratives that present people seeking asylum as ‘illegals’ and a ‘burden’ and presents instead their experiences of waiting and making a new life in two towns in Yorkshire: Halifax and Doncaster. In Halifax, a former mill town, most asylum seekers live in Park Ward, which ranks among the 10% most deprived neighbourhoods in the country. In Doncaster, people seeking asylum are dispersed to outlying former pit villages. ‘My name is not asylum seeker!’ raises questions and invites reflection on themes of asylum and hospitality, neighbourly relations, housing, marginalised voices, poverty and deprivation, place-based inequalities, and waiting and belonging.