Abstract

The city of Birmingham acts as a microcosm for the United Kingdom’s urban housing crisis, where hostile migration policies intersect with austerity-driven divestment in public housing stock to produce insecure provisioning for Birmingham's migrant and refugee communities. Birmingham’s Somali mothers are one collective who bear the brunt of this crisis in experiences of successive evictions and cycles through various forms of temporary accommodation hostels, hotels, and houses in disrepair. In this essay we listen to their testimonies of being “a homeless” [sic]. Listening reveals that homelessness makes for an emic articulation of an experience of recursive displacement that began long before the present housing crisis. “A homeless” marks a politicized refugee subjectivity that invokes multiple chronotopes of trauma, akin to what Vinh Nguyen has called refugeetude. Through this case we contribute to pressing conversations on the persistence of refugee subjectivities in postcolonial Britain and elsewhere by substantiating their psychic dimensions. We argue that attending to the distress that policies generate for marginalized groups is a critical contribution that anthropology can make.

Keywords

housing; displacement; trauma; refugee; diaspora

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2026 Nikita Kaur Simpson, Suad Duale , Elizabeth Storer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.