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In June 2007, the city of Sheffield officially declared itself to be the UK’s first ‘City of Sanctuary’, a gesture that sought to instil a spirit of ‘welcome and hospitality towards asylum seekers and refugees’. Drawing on a series of interviews and ethnographic work, this paper critically examines this gesture by considering how City of Sanctuary sought to enact a relational account of place through which the responsibilities of Sheffield towards both proximate and distant strangers were highlighted. The paper argues that while the City of Sanctuary movement integrates both relational and territorial political practices, it also actively pursues a relational imaginary through presenting the city as a space of political connections and responsibilities. This is achieved through a twin focus upon the role asylum seekers and refugees play in constituting the city and the role that Sheffield might come to play in national discussions of asylum. Following this discussion, the paper looks to the implications of City of Sanctuary’s work for a relational account of spatial politics, arguing that a dual orientation of spatial responsibilities ‘within’ and ‘beyond’ place may be more easily articulated in reference to some networks and flows than others. The experiences of City of Sanctuary therefore suggest that relational accounts must present a space of negotiation between territorial practices, political networks, spatial responsibilities and geographical imaginations. The development of City of Sanctuary into a national network of towns and cities promoting hospitality indicates the importance of such negotiations for developing a culture of refuge across British cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from a Department of Health-funded study into the emotional well-being of young people seeking asylum on their own in the UK. It discusses how young people accounted for only partly disclosing information about the circumstances surrounding their quest for asylum and subsequent aspects of their lives since arriving in the UK. Foucault's panoptic mechanism and its focus on the effects of power as dispersed through scrutiny are applied as a theoretical framework to contextualise these experiences. The paper shows that young people's decisions about how much of their current or past lives they share with others are more complex than indicated by earlier research. The paper argues that, for many young people, the predominant impetus for selective disclosure was a desire to retain a degree of agency as they navigated their way through immigration, asylum, social care, health and education systems and simultaneously sought to establish themselves in the social world. These findings have implications for how social care (and other) professionals engage and work with young people seeking asylum alone. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]