In-between belongings: impact of Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of Syrian refugees in Scotland

This event explores the co-existence of multiple and radically distinctive rhythmic worlds of Syrian refugees resettling in Scotland during the pandemic. The event is based on the findings of a research project that applies rhythmanalysis as a bio-social perspective that goes beyond the legal, ideological and material category of ‘refugee’, during the pandemic that placed refugees at a radical disjuncture from their historically-formed habitus of the society of emigration.

Participants were asked to visually document and audially reflect on their spatial and extra-spatial encounters of everyday life. The data re-presents the suturing of a fractured habitus and broken rhythms of everyday life during the pandemic. The realities of lockdown and the social experiences post-Covid resulted in a continuous cycle of formation, deformation, reformation of everyday rhythms in the daily lives of Syrian Refugees. An overarching theme of ‘emptiness’ emerged of a (temporarily) frozen time and space suffused with nostalgia for what once was and paralysis of what now is – a longing for belonging and home, as well as hopeful constructions of place-making in the society of immigration.