The UK asylum system is undergoing significant shifts toward models of “earned settlement,” in which sanctuary is temporary and contingent upon demonstrable productivity, English language proficiency, and measurable forms of “contribution” (Home Office, 2025). Such changes potentially reconfigure refugee protection from a rights-based entitlement toward a conditional framework in which belonging is evaluated through behavioural criteria.

Migration scholarship has examined the effects of precarity and temporariness (Esaiasson, 2022; Meier & Donà, 2021; Stronks, 2022), but less attention has been paid to how refugees themselves interpret expectations that protection must be “earned.” In particular, little is known about how refugees understand “contribution,” or how these understandings diverge from state-defined metrics.

This project addresses two questions: (1) how do refugees interpret and respond to emerging contribution-based expectations in the UK asylum system? and (2) how might co-produced research reshape the conceptual categories used to study these policies?

We will conduct a qualitative study with 12-15 individuals granted asylum in the UK using trauma-informed, co-produced methods. Building on 18 months of preparatory work, researchers with lived experience of the asylum system are embedded throughout the entire project, from research design to dissemination. Co-production is treated not only as an ethical commitment but also as an epistemological intervention that challenges conventional knowledge production.

When productivity becomes a condition of belonging, conventional academic research risks echoing and reinforcing the institutional categories through which migrants are governed. By redistributing interpretive authority, this project explores whether alternative understandings of contribution, belonging, and social value emerge.

The interdisciplinary team combines expertise in migration studies, participatory methodology, and psychiatry. Outputs will include: (1) an empirical article on refugees’ experiences of conditional settlement in the UK; (2) a methodological-theoretical article on co-production as an epistemological intervention; and (3) a practical toolkit for trauma-informed, equitable research.