Windrush Members’ Encounters with the ‘Hostile Environment’ and a Deficit of Citizenship

Centring an Agentive Citizenship Experience

Abstract

This article is part of a broader, collaborative Oral History project working with members of the Windrush community to explore their experience of the ‘Hostile Environment’ and their own reckoning with a historical injustice, beginning pre-2012. This article focuses on the experience of three Windrush members and their encounters with the ‘Hostile Environment’ regime from 2012 onwards, particularly the actualisation of their exclusion from British citizenship as a denial of access to ‘everyday’ citizenship. Citizenship is interpreted from a grassroots level, through the individual’s lens on how their life was uprooted in terms of their livelihood, security, wellbeing and social connection through encounters with the ‘Hostile Environment’ regime. During the data gathering process, a shared understanding of the activist nature of this research was established, creating a space within which participants were asked to reflect on and critique the state’s bordering of British citizenship and the participants’ identification as illegal within this. This article defends an agentive interpretation of citizenship as an experience that is holistically felt and made meaningful, consciously negotiated within state-imposed structures of law, enforcement and entitlement access, and then wielded as a subjectivity whereby individuals claim a more dignified existence. For members of the Windrush Generation who were left de facto stateless due to a lack of sufficient legal identification in the eyes of the state, their deficit of citizenship experience from the margins of British citizenship leaves them well positioned to critique and challenge the entrenched form of citizenship expressed through the ‘Hostile Environment’ regime.This article is part of a broader, collaborative Oral History project working with members of the Windrush community to explore their experience of the ‘Hostile Environment’ and their own reckoning with a historical injustice, beginning pre-2012.