By Jacob Livingstone, Vallen Oliver, Aya Omer, Amber Randall Cook, Noah Bouharri, Munkuti Kaisi

We have created a card game, ‘Claiming Asylum’, that captures the complexities of seeking asylum, a topic of increasing importance for humanitarian agents as crises around the world produce growing displaced populations. In our game, where players assume the roles of refugees in a camp, participants score points by taking cards from shared hands that are passed around each turn. The aim is to score the most points, which represents success in seeking asylum. Each type of card has a unique scoring system and outlines a process that can help towards seeking asylum (such as legal documents or networking). The purpose of our game is to demonstrate the diversity of asylum seekers’ experiences, avoiding popular scholarly representations of refugees as ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998), human existence which is stripped of political rights and merely acknowledged to be biologically living. Rather than reduce refugees as these passive victims, we wanted to highlight how they are political actors who navigate the precarious environment of refugee camps.

When creating a card game based on ‘earning’ legitimacy in the asylum process, ethical concerns arose for our group. Game outcomes determined by luck (like rolling a dice) remove agency from the player, rendering the refugee experience as something that simply happens to a person instead of a consciously navigated process. This reflects existing power structures that diminish refugee autonomy, where migrants are coerced into performing deservingness, compelled to present themselves as ‘helpless sufferers rather than empowered subjects’ (Huschke, 2014, p. 352). Winning through maximising illness cards centres the game on the personal satisfaction of helping someone perceived as a ‘really poor bastard’, prioritising humanitarian self-image over the dignity of those seeking help (2014, p. 355). A game built on these assumptions risks erasing refugee agency.

This game shows that refugees’ experiences are multiple and diverse. There is no single refugee story and no shared outlook that every displaced person holds. The game will demonstrate how refugees are ‘simultaneously positioned and position themselves’ (Holmes and Castaneda, 2016); they are positioned by legal framings, state policies and media framings that distinguish between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ refugees, and decide whose suffering is recognised, whilst also positioning themselves by acting within and against the conditions imposed on them. Refugees are political agents that shape their own position, whilst also being shaped by the ‘uneven social and symbolic environments’ of the refugee camp (Holmes and Castaneda, 2016, p. 20). The game is built around making this simultaneous positioning visible to the player.

In ‘Claiming Asylum’, the cards for scoring points represent the variety of factors involved in positioning refugees during the asylum seeking process. For instance, the ‘media breakthrough’ card illustrates the precarious politics of visibility in refugee experience. Chouliaraki (2010, p. 111) describes humanitarian communication as operating through a ‘selective moral imagination’, where certain narratives become legible to mainstream media, and others remain unseen. The game highlights the potential of media representation; positive depictions of refugees unlock aid, whilst absent visibility forecloses it. Access to resources therefore hinge on media framings rather than need alone, reproducing ‘hierarchies of moral value’ (2010, p. 118). Refugees must navigate broader structures that determine which appeals gain traction and which fail to resonate with Western sympathies. Chouliaraki notes that post-humanitarian communication privileges emotional engagement detached from politics, transforming distant suffering into emotion packaged for consumption. By embedding this logic into the game, the card depicts media not as a neutral conveyor of information, but a symbolic force shaping humanitarian outcomes.

Furthermore, the document and stamp cards represent how asylum claims are made legible through bureaucracy. Thomson (2012, p. 197) explains how refugees gather ‘stamps, signatures and official forms [that] can legitimate refugees’ resettlement claims’, by providing corroborating proof of persecution. Stamps are especially significant because they do not merely complete paperwork; they signal institutional recognition and attach the authority of humanitarian or state organisations to a person’s story. Without this visible connection to a documenting authority, papers lose much of their potency (Thomson, 2012). This is conveyed through the mechanics of the game, where a stamp card multiplies the score of a document card when played together. Document and stamp cards therefore show how claims to asylum are only deemed legitimate if they are officially validated through bureaucratic recognition rather than on compassion-based grounds.

The hope card demonstrates that although refugees face precarity when seeking asylum, they are not powerless against it. Rather than conditions of prolonged uncertainty in camps having immobilising effects, the anticipation for future movement produces hope that provides refugees the ability to navigate the challenging asylum seeking process (Jansen and Kleist, 2016). The belief in overcoming adversity and desire for a better life means hope plays a role in actively shaping refugees’ understandings of space and time as it sustains them on their journey. However, hope is also an unevenly distributed resource between individuals, tied to personal contexts and circumstances (for example, the state rejecting asylum applications due to insufficient documents may reduce hope, whilst a large kin network provides support that increases hope). This is reflected through the game, as the hope card is only one way to score, and players must utilise the other cards in order to win the most points. So while hope for potential movement encourages resilience and agency in the face of obstacles when seeking asylum, it is also important to acknowledge that obtaining hope is intertwined with other factors that shape the extent to which future possibilities can be imagined and pursued.

Overall, ‘Claiming Asylum’ demonstrates that the process of seeking asylum for refugees in camp should not be reduced to experiences of pure suffering, but encompass the balance between structural constraints and individual agency. The cards represent documents and stamps, illness, hope breakthroughs, media campaigns and social networks to highlight the range of factors that contribute towards creating successful asylum applications. By doing this, our game hopes to convey an awareness of the complex contextual circumstances that produce refugeeness, and the variety of lived experiences that emerge from these contexts.

Bibliography

Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press.

Chouliaraki, L. (2010) ‘Humanitarian communication beyond a politics of pity.’ International Journal of Cultural Studies, 13(2): pp. 107–126.

Holmes, S.M. and Castañeda, H. (2016) ‘Representing the “European refugee crisis” in Germany and beyond: Deservingness and difference, life and death.’ American Ethnologist, 43(1): pp. 12–24.

Huschke, S. (2014) ‘Performing deservingness: Humanitarian health care provision for migrants in Germany’, Social Science & Medicine, 120: pp. 352–359.

Kleist, N. & Jansen, S. (2016). ‘Introduction: Hope over Time – Crisis, Immobility and Future- Making’, History and Anthropology, 27(4): pp. 373–392.

Thomson, M.J. (2012) ‘Black boxes of bureaucracy: Transparency and opacity in the resettlement process of Congolese refugees’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 35(2), pp. 186–205.

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