Hostility themes in media, community and refugee narratives

In this article, we use the concept of 'dialogical network' systematically to analyse hostilities towards refugees and asylum seekers in the UK and their effects on refugees' and asylum seekers' biographical self-presentations and psychological adjustment. We find that hostility towards refugees took different forms which were in part contingent on contemporary social and political activities. We also found that all our refugee and asylum-seeker informants constructed their identities around hostilities expressed towards them in the media and by the local inhabitants. In particular, their identities were constructed in terms of biographical contrasts that made the grounds of contemporary hostile rejections false and irrelevant to themselves. Most refugee/asylum-seeker informants in our study experienced psychological problems and attributed these to enforced idleness. © 2008 SAGE Publications.