The Border Within: Highly Skilled Syrians in the UK Narrativising Work and Belonging

Abstract

This paper argues for a reconceptualisation of migrant work as a critical site for negotiating borders and belonging, focusing on highly skilled Syrian migrants in the UK, a group often overlooked in migration scholarship. Through 17 narrative conversations, the study examines how borders are embodied, negotiated, carried and crossed in the everyday professional lives of this group. Grounded in affect and bordering theories and guided by a decolonial methodology, the study explores how these professionals navigate racial, political and social hierarchies within the UK’s socio-political context. Our study asks: What does it mean to cross a border when mobility gives way to emplacement? How do borders persist within racialised migrant bodies as they navigate work and belonging? Findings highlight the affective dimensions of migrant work, revealing tensions between imposed identities and the agency to redefine the self beyond victimhood. Work functions as both an anchor and a contested terrain where identities are negotiated, transformed, and, at times, placed at risk. As the first study of its kind on highly skilled Syrian migrants in the UK, this research contributes to migration scholarship by foregrounding work as a critical space where selfhoods are actively negotiated, with significant implications for migration scholarship and the politics of identity and belonging.

1. Introduction

Despite growing research on Syrian refugees, the experiences of highly skilled Syrians in the UK remain underexplored, particularly in relation to work. Existing studies predominantly stem from economics, labour migration, and policy-oriented fields, focusing on deskilling, integration outcomes, and market participation [1,2]. While these studies have yielded valuable insights—especially from Europe and Canada [2,3,4,5], the UK remains under-researched. Moreover, to our knowledge, no studies to date have seriously considered the anthropological or affective dimensions of highly skilled Syrians’ working lives.

Some recent work begins to move in this direction. In the UK context, Tozan [6] reflects on ideas of home in exile, while Fadel [7] offers an autoethnographic account of professional life within contexts of displacement. These remain partial, individualised accounts. What is missing is sustained qualitative engagement with how highly skilled UK-based Syrian professionals navigate the meanings of work, identity, and belonging within a broader colonial framework. This study responds to that absence by foregrounding the affective embodied experiences of Syrians whose work lives are shaped by both professional aspirations and the lingering borders they continue to navigate and negotiate.

We intentionally use ‘colonial’, rather than ‘postcolonial’, to describe the UK context. While ‘postcolonial’ conventionally signals the aftermath of formal colonial rule, we contend that colonial logics remain deeply embedded in the structures, affective landscapes, and institutional practices of contemporary Britain. The treatment of refugees, asylum seekers, and racialised migrants—as outsiders, threats, or burdens—mirrors the hierarchical categorisations of colonial regimes. Policies such as the Hostile Environment, the scapegoating of the Windrush generation, and ongoing attempts to outsource asylum processing (e.g., Rwanda) exemplify this. As Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish) [8] and contributors to Shukla’s The Good Immigrant [9] have shown, Britain’s colonial past is not behind it; it is alive in cultural imaginaries and policies that continue to position some bodies as less entitled to rights, recognition and belonging. Our framing therefore aligns with scholarship reading the UK not as postcolonial, but as somewhere coloniality persists in both form and feeling. While we view this acknowledgement as a necessary part of our researcher duty, our analysis does not pursue a detailed colonial or postcolonial reading of migrant work. Instead, we focus on the affective, embodied, and bordering dimensions of participants’ experiences.

We also adopt ‘migration’ over ‘immigration’ to reflect the ongoing and unfinished nature of movement, particularly for those displaced by conflict. Where immigration implies arrival, settlement and eventual incorporation, migration conveys flux, suspension and circularity [10]. For those who cannot return, and do not fully belong, migration becomes not a moment but a condition. The refugee experience is marked by spatial and temporal liminality [11,12,13,14] and a state of “waiting” [15] (p. 11). Waiting is often associated with a condition of ‘stuckedness’, involving physical and “existential immobility” [16].

This paper explores the experiences of highly skilled Syrians who entered the UK on student visas and subsequently became unable to return after the outbreak of war. Though they arrived through legal and seemingly secure pathways, conflict transformed their relationship to the border, suspending them between professional mobility and forced emplacement. Given the nature of this group’s migration trajectories, and their clear expressions of agency in exile, we found that the concept of emplacement, rather than displacement, offered a more appropriate framing [7]. Their narratives consistently resisted pity, instead reinforcing autonomy and self-definition throughout our conversations.

The terms ‘highly skilled migrant’ and ‘refugee’ are often seen as occupying opposite ends of the migration spectrum. The former connotes privilege, agency, and contribution; the latter evokes trauma, victimhood, passivity and dependency [2,17]. Yet for many displaced professionals, such as the Syrians at the centre of this research, these categories coexist in complex, sometimes contradictory ways. A small number of our participants disclosed that they held refugee status at the time of fieldwork. Conversations around this were often emotionally and politically charged, and there was a noticeable resistance to the label refugee. We sensed that this reluctance reflected the stigma attached to the term [18] and may have deterred some participants from disclosing whether they had applied for asylum, regardless of their actual legal status. Such individuals are rarely visible in either popular narratives of refugee vulnerability or policy discourses on skilled migration. They fall between the cracks—not quite refugees, not quite expats—and must navigate a labour market that rarely values their current skills and almost always devalues their histories [2,19]. Their situation is further complicated by how they are read through the racialised and gendered lens of “Middle Easternness” [20]. Their aspirations toward stability, autonomy and belonging are interrupted by suspicion, temporality and exception [20,21,22].

We propose that, for this group, work is not merely a site of economic participation, but an emotionally and politically charged terrain, imbued with aspirations, exclusions and negotiations of self. Building on Baldry et al.’s [23] call to consider work beyond the confines of formal labour, we argue for a conceptualisation of work as an affective category—one that reflects and produces hierarchies of value, recognition and (un)belonging. Work, then, is not just something migrants ‘do’; it is a space to navigate questions of identity, dignity, belonging and emplacement. We ask: How are borders—symbolic, affective and embodied—encountered and negotiated in the everyday professional lives of highly skilled Syrians in the UK? How do these borders linger long after the act of migration, embedded within the migrant body as it navigates the world of work?

We argue that if “borders are everywhere” [24,25,26], constantly drawn and redrawn, we must move beyond the assumption that they are fixed, universally understood structures. Instead, borders are fluid, contested, negotiated and experienced differently depending on social, political and historical contexts. Our study develops this perspective by arguing that borders, our experiences of them, and practices of bordering are inherently affective. We are not the first to suggest this; scholars, frustrated with a reductive conceptualisation of borders as physical entities, have long grappled with borders’ less visible dimensions. Many reject forms of border thinking which rely upon borders as easily identifiable—and easily drawn on a map—that obscure key dimensions of bordering processes [27,28]. Borders are not just territorial demarcations; they are lived and felt, shaping emotions, identities and everyday interactions. They are entwined with our memories, even the workings of our hearts [29]. By foregrounding affective dimensions of borders, this study highlights how highly skilled Syrians in exile navigate and contest boundaries long after their physical migration.

This paper positions the border as central to understanding migrants’ working lives. Borders are not static, but inscribed and reinscribed across time, space and bodies. They are sites of state control, but also affective zones where belonging is negotiated and withheld. This observation resonates with the migrants in our study, whose lives are marked by invisible yet persistent bordering processes and by the very condition of “living on borders and in margins” [30]. The idea that “we don’t cross borders, the borders cross us” [30] (p. 48) becomes a lens to understand how borders are experienced and resisted.

We begin the paper by reviewing the literature on migration, borders, and affect, examining work as a site of dialectical tension, where notions of ‘self’ and ‘identity’ are continuously negotiated, disrupted and reconstituted. We then develop a conceptual framework, drawing on Anzaldúa’s and Ahmed’s work, that allows us to situate migrant work experiences within the realm of the affective and embodied, while centring the border as not just spatial but epistemic. An outline of our decolonial methodological approach follows, with empirical data from fieldwork in three UK cities. Next, we offer a ‘voice-centred’ analysis of how highly skilled Syrians negotiate their professional selves in the UK, and how borders continue to shape their lives long after arrival.

2. Borders That Linger: The Affective Dimensions of Migration and Migrant Work

Borders are “physical expressions of the dividing line between states such as checkpoints and fences” [31] (pp. 6–7). Massey [32] argues, however, that borders are not merely geographical markers but spaces with “selective filtering systems,” (p. 130) persistently transgressed and continually reasserted. Understanding the border as mutable, unstable, and deeply emotional is the foundation for our theoretical framing. We view borders as ideological structures that are continually made and remade through social relations [33]. Borders are also produced through discourse and power [34], felt in the body [35], and traversed not only geographically but emotionally and epistemically. This framing is especially relevant in the context of global displacement, where the border is a mobile and affective infrastructure that follows migrants into workplaces, homes and bodies.

The conceptual expansion of the border as an ideological, embodied, and affective formation has been central to critical border studies in the last two decades. Balibar’s “Borders are everywhere” [26] highlights how contemporary bordering practices extend into everyday life. Mezzadra and Neilson [36] argue that borders function as “differential” devices that sort and hierarchise populations. Scholars have extended these insights to the internalisation of the border in Western democracies, especially the UK. The “hostile environment” policy [37,38] illustrates how bordering now occurs within welfare systems, educational institutions, healthcare services, and neighbourhoods. Migrants are repeatedly required to prove their legitimacy, legality, and worthiness—an ongoing process of bordering from within.

If borders are not simply physical demarcations but affective infrastructures that follow migrants into everyday life [39], then the question becomes not just what or where borders are but how they are felt, experienced, embodied and negotiated, and how they operate as emotional architectures of inclusion and exclusion. To follow Mae Ngai’s [40] groundbreaking insight, borders are inscribed “inside” and “outside” individuals as they attempt to access work, healthcare, social protection and belonging. This ongoing bordering process is rarely captured in dominant migration typologies. How is a border embodied? How is it carried, negotiated, and metabolised by migrants who are simultaneously welcomed for their skills and excluded for their origins?

2.1. Borders as Affective and Embodied Experiences

To engage with these questions, we turn to Ahmed [35,41,42], who has argued that bodies are both biological entities and social orientations. They are marked by proximity to power, and in relation to normative structures of whiteness, masculinity and heterosexuality. Some bodies dwell more easily in space “because Spaces are orientated ‘around’ whiteness” [42] (p. 157), while others—immigrant, racialised, non-normative—are marked “out of place” [41] (pp. 38–55) The border, then, is a phenomenological formation. It shapes who feels at home and who feels surveilled; who is allowed to move freely and who is made to prove their right to be. In Ahmed’s words, “the strange body threatens to traverse the border that establishes the ‘clean body’ of the white” [41] (p. 52). Borders, then, are experienced differently depending on the body that crosses—or is imagined threatening to cross, them. Ahmed [41] further argues that this dynamic constructs a subject who feels at home only by expelling the “other”. The white subject is able to move with ease precisely because others are denied that mobility.

Thus, borders are also conditions of impossibility for those rendered “a body out of place” [41] (p. 55). As Anzaldúa [30,43] reminds us, borderlands are sites of both oppression and potential, spaces of hybridity, flux and contradiction. Anzaldúa does not romanticise this hybridity but emphasises its pain and precarity. This echoes Ahmed’s work on embodiment: the strange body does not become something else; it is marked and extended by its encounters, shaped by where it is allowed—or denied. Haraway’s provocation that “our bodies don’t end at the skin” [44] (p. 203), helps us understand borders as extensions of the body: structures that entangle flesh, movement, and history. The border is Ahmed’s [45] “brick wall of racism” (p. 22): not always visible, but always felt; not at the edge, but the centre of lived experience.

To understand how borders are lived, we must attend to their affective and embodied dimensions. Ahmed’s [35,41,46] work on affect offers a compelling analytic: borders are not just lines but feelings. Emotions such as fear, shame and gratitude do not reside inside individuals but circulate socially, attaching themselves to bodies and histories. Migrants become the affective carriers of anxiety, hope or suspicion—figures through which national imaginaries are negotiated. Highly skilled migrants from conflict zones often find themselves in an acutely ambivalent position: celebrated for their qualifications yet mistrusted for their backgrounds; welcomed for their utility but excluded from full belonging (see [6,47] for a study of highly skilled Turks in Germany [48]). Foreignness is both commodified and pathologised. Ahmed [35] argues they inhabit a ‘phenomenology of whiteness,’ navigating spaces not built for them, where they must constantly ‘orient’ themselves around an invisible norm.

2.2. Work as a Site of Bordering

Employment is often treated in policy as a neutral mechanism of migrant integration [49,50]. Yet for many, work is a primary site of bordering [32]. Examining work experiences of female migrant domestic and care workers, Mezzadra and Neilson [36] point to the “relevance of borders and boundaries through practices of mobility and migration that increasingly shape the composition of living labor” (p. 130). Similarly, Anderson, Sharma, and Wright [33] state that “[b]orders follow people and surround them as they try to access paid labour, welfare benefits, health, labour protections, education, civil associations, and justice” (p. 6). The border manifests as gatekeeping, credential scepticism, accent policing, and emotional containment. In this way, employment reproduces racialised value hierarchies, rendering some migrants “deserving” and others disposable [51,52]. In perpetuating this hierarchy (see [53]), the immigrant body, through its affective labour, becomes a border site itself, an embodied terrain of negotiation where belonging must be performed and legitimacy continually reaffirmed. The border is then something one becomes; it clings to the skin, to the name, to the accent, to the CV. It is the ever-present demand to be legible, to be grateful, to assimilate.

This is pronounced for highly skilled migrants from the Global South. Their professional legitimacy is often questioned, their credentials dismissed, and their authority undermined. As Fadel [7] and Tozan [6] both show in their work on Syrians in the UK, professional life becomes an arena of both aspiration and humiliation, where migrants must continually prove themselves in systems that remain structured by whiteness and structural inequalities. The figure of the “good migrant” [9] looms large in these narratives. Syrian refugees and migrants are often held up as model migrants, symbols of resilience and contribution [54,55]. Yet this framing is precarious and conditional. It rests on continued performance, on the erasure of pain, and on the suppression of critique. One must be grateful, but not too vocal; successful, but not proud.

Against this backdrop, our paper approaches work as a deeply affective terrain, shaped by racial capitalism [56] and enduring structures of bordering and exclusion [45,57]. It asks what it means to “make it” in a society ambivalent about one’s presence, and what kinds of borders continue to structure that success. We propose that serious narrative attention be paid to what Stoler [58] calls “interior frontiers”: the vernacular thresholds of belonging that create unspoken distinctions between self and other. These frontiers are particularly challenging to grasp with conventional social science tools because they rarely appear through overt acts of boundary-drawing [59]. Rather, they operate quietly, subtly, and with great force, shaping who is allowed in and who is excluded from the “communities of value” [60] that make up the affective socio-political space of societies.

These borders cannot be traversed through official procedures or legally binding documents. As Stoler [59] reminds us, their power lies in the fact that they are “not delineated by barbed wires, but by unarticulated and often inaccessible conventions” (p. 6). They are affectively charged terrains of belonging, rather than fixed legal or geographical markers. Building on this, Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy [37] conceptualise “everyday bordering” as the transfer of border control practices from the physical terrain of the border into the internal social domain of daily life, turning ordinary figures such as teachers, doctors and employers into de facto border guards. Strasser and Tibet [61] add that everyday bordering is neither reducible to the physical border nor confined to the institutional sphere. Instead, they argue that it is anchored in the everyday and folded into social relationships. To capture these dynamics, we must move beyond a narrow focus on policies and legal frameworks and attend to how borders are socially reproduced in the intimate, relational spaces of work and life.

2.3. Theoretical Framing

Ahmed’s work offers a powerful lens for understanding how affect circulates to shape bodies, spaces and belonging. Her concept of ‘affective economies’ emphasises that emotions are not merely private, internal states but circulate between bodies, “sticking” to some and not to others, aligning subjects with or against particular communities [46]. In this way, emotions actively produce boundaries of belonging—determining who feels “at home” and who is rendered “out of place” [41]. Her notion of bodily orientation furthers this by conceptualising how bodies take shape through the directions they face—what they turn towards or away from [62]. Orientations are not neutral but are shaped by histories, social structures and power relations, making some paths accessible while foreclosing others and structuring whose movements are enabled and whose are restricted. Together, these concepts allow us to trace how exclusion is not merely structural but affective, lived at the level of bodily possibility. Anzaldúa’s theorisation of the borderlands complements Ahmed by foregrounding the creative and painful work of inhabiting in-between spaces. Her concept of mestiza consciousness articulates how those living at the borders—literal or figurative—develop a “tolerance for ambiguity” and the capacity to hold contradictory identities in flux [30] (p. 79). This hybridity is not simply a blending of identities but an active, ongoing negotiation of power and meaning, a continual “crossing” and “re-crossing” of boundaries. In Anzaldúa’s framework, identity is not a fixed state, but a process of continual transformation shaped by friction and conflict.

Placing Ahmed and Anzaldúa in dialogue highlights how affective economies and identity-in-flux interact: borders are not only material but are felt through the body, as affect “sticks” to racialised and migrant bodies and orients them towards certain possibilities while disorienting them from others [62]. At the same time, the negotiation of multiple identities in the borderlands becomes a creative but difficult process, requiring constant re-orientation and redefinition [30]. Together, their work provides a robust framework for understanding work not merely as economic activity but as a bordered, affective, and embodied space. Ahmed helps map how power and emotion direct bodies and delimit possibilities, while Anzaldúa provides language for the liminality and negotiation of identities in flux. This theoretical pairing underpins our analytic approach, enabling us to situate the analysis within a decolonial, relational framework, centring participants’ lived realities over abstract or policy-driven accounts and highlighting the everyday negotiations through which they attempt to “make it” in spaces that are not always designed for them.

3. A Relational Decolonial Approach to Analysis

A relational epistemology underpins the narrative we present in this paper. Carefully weaving together 17 in-depth conversations with highly skilled Syrian women and men living in the UK, we acknowledge that knowledge is inherently contextual and emergent within relationships. More importantly, our stance aligns with decolonial research methodologies, which prioritise ways of knowing rooted in care, responsibility, and resistance to epistemic domination [63,64,65]. We engage with theorists who speak from and to the margins, those who centre lived experiences of exclusion as a source of epistemic insight. We, therefore, look to Ahmed and Anzaldúa for both their analytical insights and their ethical positioning. Decolonising research means “respectfully knowing and understanding theory and research from previously ‘Other(ed)’ perspectives” [66] (p. 2). It means resisting the temptation to resolve contradiction, learning instead from the discomfort of hybridity. This is, as Fanon [67] insisted, a project of “complete disorder”—not because it is chaotic, but because it unsettles the order of things. In this spirit, we reject universalist assumptions about migration, integration or identity. We instead approach borders as historically situated, affectively lived, and materially embodied structures that shape—and are shaped by, the lives of those who cross and carry them.

3.1. Research as Responsibility: The Telling of Migrant Stories

As a team of three women researchers, led by a Syrian woman from a refugee-immigrant background, now a British citizen, we entered this project with a strong intention to decolonise our process. We resisted standardised, often Western-derived methodological models in favour of a framework grounded in attentiveness, humility and reciprocity. Grounded in this philosophy, our approach offers a nuanced engagement with the complexities of migration, and the transactional nature of meaning-making in research. These conditions demand research practices that are attuned to the liminal, fluid, and often paradoxical dimensions of migrant life. We foreground fragmentation, uncertainty and multiplicity as methodological strengths. Migrant stories, in our reading, are not linear narratives of before and after, but rich, sometimes uncomfortable expressions of fractured time, dislocated space, and the embodied experience of ‘not fully inhabiting’ the present. In refusing to categorise our participants reductively—as refugees or migrants, displaced or settled—we create room to hear what emerges when assumptions are suspended, when we let stories speak for themselves. Rather than arrive with predefined categories or tidy conclusions, we begin with a commitment to listening, to dwelling with discomfort, and to working with the ethical messiness [68] of people’s lives. In doing so, we reject the dualistic separation of knowing and doing. Our theoretical and methodological grounding is not static but continually negotiated, reshaped by the stories we encounter and the relational responsibilities they entail.

The decision to use a relational decolonial approach was grounded in a desire to remain accountable to our Syrian participants, not as data sources, but as co-constructors of meaning. While ultimately, we still hold representational power, we aim to share our interlocutors’ stories while reflecting as far as possible complexity, holding space for contradiction, opacity and ambiguity. We share the view that “[i]nvisible power dynamics are embedded within research frameworks, ... researchers possess an unequal power to define, label, and alienate oppressed populations” [66] (p. 3). While we worked consciously to resist this dynamic, we remained alert to its potential and conscious of our power. As Thambinathan and Kinsella [66] further note, “[t]he decolonization of research can be achieved by being critically reflexive and enabling reciprocity within relationships” (p. 3).

Our practice was shaped by what Spivak [69] refers to as critical intimacy: the researcher’s willingness to be present and vulnerable while seeking knowledge. This intimacy was not about collapsing distance for the sake of familiarity, but about making space for patience, complexity and shared understanding. Intimacy, for us, was a decolonial act—one that fostered attentiveness and solidarity rather than mastery or control. We recognise, too, that even the critical paradigm is “still a Western approach” [66] (p. 2), and our engagement with it strives to be both reflexive and critical. This is not a rejection of criticality, but an embrace of a decolonial form of criticality, one that centres relational ethics, emotional labour and epistemic justice, and challenges a toxic singular narrative that treats “all Syrians—all refugees—as one amorphous mass of people, rather than individuals in their own right with lives, children, careers, homes, hopes, and dreams” [70].

In sharing a commitment to anti-colonial scholarship, we view decolonial work as a moral imperative. Our decolonial orientation extends to the form of the research encounter itself. We did not dictate conversation settings or formats. Instead, participants chose when and where to meet—often in their homes, cafes, or workplaces—spaces they now inhabit and within which they negotiate belonging. This seemingly simple gesture was an important act of reversing power and co-creating comfort. To have a conversation, in this context, was to embrace the fluidity of knowledge, not as fixed or extractable, but emergent and negotiated in relation. Denscombe [71] reminds us that colonisation was not only the physical invasion of land but also the imposition of a worldview. A decolonial research practice must, therefore, open up spaces for sitting with the complexity of these narratives, and trace how borders are not only drawn around migrant bodies but also through them—internalised, resisted and, sometimes, reimagined.

To do this, we understand our Syrian participants role not as a research ‘sample’ but as narrators and collaborators in a co-created space of meaning, testimony and analysis. Their narratives are acts of remembering and meaning-making in motion, shaped as much by what is spoken as by what is felt, recalled and withheld. This approach opens up a space where knowledge is produced relationally and with care. In this sense, we follow Ahmed’s framing of migration stories as “skin memories: memories of different sensations that are felt on the skin” [41] (p. 92). For Ahmed, migration is not simply a movement between geographic locations; it is a process of becoming estranged, of feeling displacement through the body as a discomfort or inability to fully inhabit the present. Our Syrian partners’ stories echoed this feeling of dislocation, reflecting not only their geographic and political journeys but also the emotional, bodily toll of forced rupture. For the above reasons, while we have used ‘participants’ in earlier sections for methodological clarity, from this point onwards we refer to our Syrian participants as ‘narrative partners’ – or ‘partners’ for short.

Armed by a radical listening philosophy [72,73], our approach encouraged us to remain attuned to the specificity of each narrative partner’s life while acknowledging our own positionalities and the dynamics they produce. We also asked our partners to choose their own pseudonyms rather than us doing this ‘for’ or ‘instead of’ them. Some decided to use their own names. To guide our analysis, we used the Listening Guide, a voice-centred relational method developed by Mauthner and Doucet [74] and based on the model first introduced by Brown and Gilligan [73]. This method involved four sequential readings of each transcript:

• Reading for the plot: to map key events, tensions, and narrative structure;
• Reading for the voice of “I”: to explore self-positioning, agency, and narrative voice;
• Reading for relationships: to examine how participants narrate their connections to people, places, and institutions;
• Contextual reading: to situate these narratives within broader political, social, and structural forces, particularly the UK’s migration and labour systems.

This approach allowed us to pay close attention not only to what was said, but how it was said—through tone, silence and repetition. Silences, in particular, were read not as absences but as meaningful articulations of trauma, protection or resistance. Our readings were essential in analysing life stories, focusing on the implicit and explicit examples used to describe struggles faced as migrants working or looking for work, how our partners negotiated these, and then how they used them to build a sense of identity and belonging. The Guide’s readings helped steer away from Western conceptualisations of work and what it means and focused on work experiences centring the ‘migrant body’ and its affective negotiation, and possible crossing, of everyday borders.

These narrative partners are 17 highly skilled Syrians aged between 30 and 40, who arrived in the UK before 2011, most through the Capacity Building Project, a joint initiative between the British Council and the Syrian Ministry of Higher Education. Initially here for postgraduate study, their trajectories were disrupted, personally, emotionally, and administratively, by the outbreak of the Syrian war. The freezing of scholarships, closure of embassies, and severing of diplomatic ties left many in sudden legal and existential limbo. Some became asylum seekers overnight, no longer able to return home and no longer seen as temporary visitors. These cases challenge dominant migration categories, which often hinge on rigid and depersonalised definitions. As Bauböck [75] and Scheel and Squire [76] note, mainstream models tend to treat migration as either forced or voluntary, legal or illegal—binary terms that ignore the ambiguity of real human experiences. Though they arrived as international students, our partners’ options narrowed dramatically post-2011. For some, the end of Tier 4 visas meant choosing between applying for asylum, securing sponsorship for a Tier 2 work visa, or returning to an unsafe Syria.

Our partners are therefore unified by transience—not a demographic category, but a lived condition that cuts across legal statuses and timelines, and emplacement, as they were forced to surrender legal and psychological ties to their previous status. As Nagel [77] (p. 197) argues, the “diversity of patterns and experiences within the category of skilled migrant” defies reductionist treatment. Indeed, attempts to maintain tidy academic definitions at the expense of lived complexity risk misrepresentation. We therefore reject such simplifications and instead centre the textured and often contradictory experiences of our narrative partners.

3.2. Further Methodological Considerations

Fieldwork was conducted over a three-month period in 2018. Our narrative partners were recruited primarily through snowball sampling, facilitated by Fadel’s pre-existing connections with Syrian communities in Scotland and beyond. While not statistically representative, this approach is particularly valuable for studies involving dispersed or hard-to-reach populations, fostering trust and openness in the research process, and enabling the collection of nuanced, collaboratively constructed accounts of experience. Our narrative conversations averaged 54 minutes, were conducted in English, and transcribed verbatim. Although partners were encouraged to use Arabic where preferred, only a few chose to do so, usually when referencing cultural artefacts like music or television. Fadel, a native Arabic speaker and professional translator, was well positioned to navigate any code-switching. The study was approved by Heriot-Watt University’s School of Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee, and all participants gave informed consent.

Our positionalities shaped both the research process and the stories we were able to hear. Fadel, as a Syrian and a former Capacity Building scholar, was often recognised by partners as an insider. This shared background created immediate trust and openness—several partners turned to her with phrases like “you know what it’s like,” signalling that their accounts could move beyond explanation and into shared recognition. At the same time, Strani’s position as a Greek researcher who has lived in multiple countries (Belgium, Russia, and the UK) introduced a perspective shaped by her own experiences of mobility, linguistic negotiation and cultural adaptation. This often prompted partners to reflect on belonging and integration in more comparative terms, drawing parallels between their experiences and other migrant groups. Partners also tended to provide more explanation and context for Strani’s benefit, assuming that she is unfamiliar with Syrian history and politics, and Syrian cultural practices. This additional context would not have been provided if Fadel were conducting the interviews alone. Equally, the dynamic of the interviews and what was shared would have been different if Strani or any other non-Syrian were conducting the interview alone.

This insider-outsider dynamic brought both benefits and challenges during fieldwork. As Phipps [78,79] and Robinson-Pant and Wolf [80] argue, multilingual and cross-cultural research can open up new spaces of engagement but also risk misalignment or partial understanding. We were acutely aware of how race, nationality and perceived identity shape interviews. Shelton [81] warns that white interviewers may elicit responses shaped by social desirability or perceived expectations, and Augoustinos and Every [82] note that individuals may downplay experiences of racism to avoid being cast as confrontational. Kirkwood, McKinlay, and McVittie [83] similarly found that asylum seekers in Glasgow often minimised discrimination when interviewed by researchers perceived to represent the majority.

Drugan, though not involved in the fieldwork, played a key role in the analysis phase. Her Scottish background and deep knowledge of the UK’s academic and policy landscape allowed us to situate partners’ accounts within broader structural and ethical contexts. Her relative distance from the fieldwork offered a valuable critical lens—challenging initial interpretations and helping ensure that our analysis did not over-identify with partners’ experiences.

Together, these positionalities created a productive balance between closeness and distance. Fadel’s cultural and experiential proximity ensured emotional resonance [7], Strani’s transnational perspective encouraged comparative and reflexive questioning, and Drugan’s analytic distance strengthened the rigour and critical framing of the findings. This triangulation allowed us to hold space for complexity and contradiction, co-constructing meaning while remaining critically self-aware of our representational power. These considerations shaped both our methodology and our ongoing reflexivity throughout the project.

4. From Listening to Meaning-Making

Having laid out our methodological framework, we now turn to the conversations themselves to explore how our Syrian partners’ work experiences in the UK intersect with evolving identities and sense of belonging through the four layers of the Listening Guide [74]. What follows are not narratives of seamless integration or linear success. They are layered accounts of rupture, resistance, negotiation and redefinition. As we listened, we paid attention not only to what was said, but to how voices shifted—sometimes fractured, often gathering strength—as partners narrated the place of work in their lives.

To ground our analysis, we draw on the key theoretical concepts from our analytic scaffolding (see Section 2.3). The sections that follow map these theoretical insights onto illustrative quotes, showing how they illuminate the relational, affective, and embodied texture of work and belonging. We then revisit our theoretical underpinnings to examine whether and how the conceptualisations of work, borders, identity, and belonging discussed in our literature review may resonate with, and help to interpret, the insights drawn from our data.

4.1. Work as Continuity and Survival (Listening for Plot and Orientation)

For many of our partners, work emerged as the central thread holding their stories together—a source of continuity and rootedness in lives disrupted by war and displacement. Rabee put it plainly: “Everything I do is about my work.” This was not merely a description of his occupation; it was a declaration of purpose, a means of anchoring himself amid chaos and change. His job meant a great deal to him, and he insisted that the person he became through his work was not the same as before. Yet, Rabee also explained that without support from those around him, things would have been much harder:

“I was offered the job because I had experience in Syria and here, teaching. The Edinburgh lecturer who wrote the reference letter highlighted my skills properly. He didn’t use an old reference letter—he wrote exactly what I did for them. He wrote I was a senior tutor for three years with the University. That gave me the opportunity to be accepted, in addition to many things they wrote, because the reference letter really does affect the choice.”

Rabee’s previous experience was recognised, and the support he received from a colleague validated and did justice to his expertise. Rabee was not alone in how he valued work. Joud similarly insisted: “I don’t want to be dramatic, but a job is everything.” When asked about the time it took him to secure employment and his experience with applications and interviews, he explained:

“My family was in Scotland, and that limited me. My options were academia, if I wanted to stay in Scotland, which meant only three or four universities. After six months, I applied to a university in March 2016. I also applied to a company that had a branch in Glasgow—applied twice and they rejected me twice pretty quickly. In one case, I made the application at 11 pm, and they rejected me at 8 am the next morning. Without an interview. … This company had a list of countries they support, and some countries are excluded. Syria is among them. So it might have been a security issue.”

Others, like Nawar, also emphasised that “a job is very, very important” (he repeated the second ‘very’ for emphasis)—“a job is self-actualisation.” Similarly, Ramy described work as “a sense of achievement, purpose and security.” When asked whether he felt different from the person he was before securing employment in the UK, he replied:

“I think I am, yes. The way I think, the way I see things. I don’t care about what people think of me.”

Not all partners, however, expressed a sure sense of identity through work. Lily, for example, introduced herself hesitantly—“a pharmacist or a cell biologist”—and reflected that without work there is “a struggle to belong in the UK.” Adam, by contrast, laughed when asked whether work had changed his sense of self or belonging:

“I wouldn’t say I’m a different person. It has not changed me; I am still the same person. OK, it has changed me on a small level. It has given me additional skills, gave me more confidence. People still recognise me! (laughs).”

Adam had been among the fortunate few who secured employment easily and described himself as “extremely lucky.” For him, belonging was tied less to transformation than to confidence and value: “The job has made me more confident. I feel I know more about the society, so yes.” For others, things were not as straightforward. Sam described the frustration of having eight years of professional experience in Syria rendered meaningless in the UK:

“I worked in an architectural practice for eight years in Syria. I know I don’t have the experience related to the UK—maybe this is one of the problems. But I know people here who had experience from Syria and completed their PhD here but don’t have a gap in work experience. I did not work here in the UK and that is part of the problem. I just came here to study and was planning to go back, but it just wasn’t possible. I decided to stay here and find a job to support my family.”

For Sam, work was not so much about identity as about social reconnection: “A job will help me communicate with society and build relationships with others again.” These accounts expose a dissonance between a professional identity built in Syria and the marginalisation encountered in the UK. This sense of being caught between recognition and erasure, between expertise and deskilling, surfaced repeatedly across narratives.

Joud captured another dimension of this experience—the cruelty of faceless rejection: “Being rejected by a machine” and not having the chance to speak to a person. “I don’t want to be rejected by a template.” These moments revealed not only a loss of career trajectory but also embodied responses—raised voices, tension, the look of confusion or fatigue—that mark work as what Ahmed [62] calls “an orientation device” (p. 3) that directs bodies “toward” some futures and “away” from others. For our partners, employment was not simply a site of economic continuity but a way of reorienting themselves in the aftermath of displacement.

For some, work was less about identity and more about survival. Nawaf said simply, “I do my job,” offering no embellishment. For Lily, work meant “that I’m seeking settlement in this city,” while Joud noted the precariousness of place: “It’s not like it’s my country; I can get a casual job and then stay for as long as I want. I can’t stay as long as I want.” For AH, work was “acceptance.” Lily went further: “Securing a job will enforce belonging.” Yet AH also reflected ambivalently:

“I don’t think the work will change the belonging. For me, work is work… In the long term, if I have stable work, a family, a whole baggage of life in this country, that will affect—I’m not sure, maybe, I don’t know, I’m not in this situation yet. I still belong to where I came from.”

Even in these pared-back accounts, work remained a steady presence—a necessary structure in lives shaped by uncertainty. Work, then, was more than just employment: it was a marker of stability, a site of aspiration, and often a battleground for belonging. As Ahmed [46] reminds us, orientation involves “how we reside in space, how we inhabit the world,” and for our partners, belonging was not automatically reoriented toward the UK by virtue of working there. Work provided continuity and a platform for survival, but it did not necessarily dislodge their affective attachments to “where [they] came from.”

As partners narrated their professional lives and we listened, another layer appeared beneath the surface: work was an expression of the self—and of the tensions within it. It revealed identities in flux, negotiating a sense of belonging.

4.2. Work as Identity-in-Flux: Orientations of the Body (Listening for the “I”)

When partners spoke, they often moved fluidly between singular and collective voices, revealing how identity is lived through relational and bodily orientation. This oscillation was significant not in itself, but in what it revealed about how feelings of belonging were shared, contrasted, and negotiated across narratives. AH, for example, at one moment asserted national toughness—“We’re tough, like Syrian fighters”—and moments later confessed, “I still belong to where I came from… I’m floating.” That image of floating captures a liminality that is both bodily and existential. Ahmed [62] opines that bodies take the shape of the contact they have with the world, and here AH’s sense of suspension, neither fully rooted in Syria nor in the UK, reflects a body in a state of “orientation trouble,” hovering between multiple points of belonging.

Joud likewise shifted between the individual and the collective in articulating his belonging: “We [Syrians] didn’t come here for a better life, we had a brilliant life in Syria! We just came here to study.” His comment highlighted a shared struggle, of finding themselves unable to return home and having to emplace themselves in a new, imposed context.

Belonging, however, was not only necessary or multidimensional; it was also conditional. Anas articulated this conditionality clearly: “If I can find a job where I use my skills… I feel I belong.” This conditional ‘if’ speaks to what Ahmed [62] calls the phenomenology of exclusion—how it feels to inhabit spaces that do not extend a welcome—and to Anzaldúa’s [30] notion that borderland identities are never finished but always in flux. Belonging, in this sense, was not a given but something continually negotiated, tested, and at times withheld.

Ramy’s account further illustrated this instability. He initially claimed that he had never felt a sense of belonging to Syria, then retracted that statement, later asserting that he belonged more to Syria, and eventually that he felt he belonged to Scotland. His narrative was marked by hesitancy and self-correction:

“But now with my wife, I can see it’s hard for her to adapt here. I think I will go back to Syria. I start to feel that I belong more to Syria now, after getting married my wife and her family and my family phoning me every day. I liked limits, I would not phone them every day. I used to speak every day, then every week, I wanted to adapt to life here but now it’s different, but now I am back to phoning every day. I feel I belong more to Syria.”

Contextual factors appeared to shape Ramy’s sense of belonging. He later told us:

“Now, I am lost to be honest. Before my marriage, I felt I belonged to Scotland, not the UK but Scotland. I love Scotland. I honestly believe I belong to Scotland. This country gave me everything I dreamed of. It gave me more than I ever expected.”

Interestingly, Ramy’s sense of belonging to Scotland was not tied to work. As a business owner, he was content professionally. What unsettled him were experiences of pity and racism when he revealed he was Syrian, which led him to sometimes conceal his origins:

“I guess it depends on the person. I used to feel shy and not say I was from Syria at some point, now I don’t feel that way any longer. It depends on people; if they are educated, I say I am from Syria. If they are not, I choose not to say. I don’t lie, I tell people I am from a little city close to Cyprus. But people don’t know Cyprus. I hate to feel that someone pities me. I can’t take it. And also I have met some racist people here. I don’t care. They are racist, it’s their business. They are racist against Syrians.”

Ramy was not alone in this. Others, such as Anas and Joud, also described feeling pitied or treated with bias because of their Syrianness or foreign-sounding names. Ramy’s narrative, like theirs, evokes what Anzaldúa [30] terms the ‘borderlands condition’: identity negotiated through contradiction and ambivalence. These oscillations in self-description are not signs of confusion, but of what Anzaldúa calls mestiza consciousness—“una herida abierta,” an open wound where “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (p. 3). It is a consciousness defined by ambiguity and the ability to shift between worlds.

Ramy later reflected on the possibility of returning to Syria, though with ambivalence. He was clear, however, that his business—and parts of his life—would remain in the UK, serving as a bridge between his two worlds:

“I think I will [hesitates]... go back, regardless of the situation. I will go back to my [home] University. Sometimes I think life is short and I should be happy. I am happy physically speaking but my soul is not very happy here. Maybe if I go, I will regret it? I did regret it before when I went back for a month to visit. I think I need to be with my parents, they are getting older, but won’t go back without the passport. But I will definitely go back, to my home university, but will keep my business here. I will retire at 45 hopefully, if my wife does not spend all of my money before then (laughs).”

Ramy’s narrative exemplifies a body and self in motion—“here and there” simultaneously—oscillating between longing and fear, between the desire to return and the worry of regret. His statement that his “soul is not very happy here” captures the dissonance between physical emplacement and emotional dislocation, an inability to orient both body and soul when identity is in flux. Ramy was among those who did not experience deep recognition through work or community life. His domestic circumstances left him isolated, unable to connect with the wider Scottish community. This contrasts sharply with other accounts. Fadi, for instance, reported no experiences of discrimination; indeed, he felt that his Syrianness strengthened his sense of belonging in the UK:

“I belong to Syria and Britain at the same time [smiles]. The two countries have given me so much. Syria sent me here, gave me this opportunity, made it possible for me to get a career. Britain has given me a job, support from colleagues, I am happy and life is good here. I feel that I belong here. I work to improve the quality of life in London and I am proud of that. I have never faced any issues to do with racial discrimination while there are other British people, black, they may have experienced that and say that they have not got the job because they are black. My Syrian background has actually helped me because people here appreciate the fact that someone who has come from such a background as me, from a country that is at war and I have progressed and made a life for myself and fought for a good job. I feel proud of my Syrian background, not ashamed of it.”

4.3. Work as Recognition and Dignity (Listening for Relationships)

But work also functioned as a medium through which recognition, and its absence, circulated. Alexandra described how employment “gives you recognition... I feel I am also contributing to society, a part of the society… It enriches you as a person and on an emotional level.” For Alexandra, work was empowerment—an enactment of personhood beyond domestic roles. Roula expressed this succinctly: “It makes you feel useful.” David associated work with vitality: “I feel alive,” while Fadi linked job, team, and belonging: “I feel I belong, I am one of them... it helps me feel that I am doing something for my city, London.” Similarly, Adam reflected on the meaning of usefulness and contribution:

“Being employed is a good way to pay back. When you’re employed, you are contributing in tax; you’re helping maybe somebody else in need. Also, it will give you more on a personal level. It would give you value. It makes you feel like you have achieved something. If I weren’t not working, I would be doing the same thing as a hobby. I would not say it adds value to my life because if I am not working, I could still be active, doing programming, and add value in another way. When you are paying tax, the community benefits from that. I think I feel more integrated into British society because of my job, yes.”

Rabee similarly described the satisfaction of being appreciated in his work:

“After working one year with my 1st year students, I found that my time devoted to them was really appreciated and I got the rewards, I felt appreciated.”

These are not just isolated expressions but part of what Ahmed [35] calls “affective economies”—emotions that circulate and attach themselves to certain bodies, producing forms of connection and belonging. The pride of being a worker, the dignity of usefulness, the sense of vitality: all function as currencies of belonging. Yet, as Ahmed also warns, these affective investments can “bind us to the very conditions of our subordination,” requiring participants to perform resilience or gratitude even when recognition is partial or conditional.

Rabee offered a vivid illustration of this tension when describing a memorable career moment. He recalled the mixed emotions of producing an excellent project proposal that was ultimately rejected for his being Syrian:

“Professionally, I don’t know, when I had my first funding, when they called me back and told me that we can’t give me the funding because I, as one of the team members, was from Syria and was flagged by the sanctions list. Yes, they said that was the reason, but they were interested in the project and invited me to establish a new partnership. I wrote this funding application and almost got it. But that moment when they said how strong the project was, that sense of achievement was the most memorable for me.”

Recognition, therefore, could also be precarious. Anas, trained as an engineer but working in hospitality, said simply: “I don’t belong in the food business.” Naya put it plainly: “Work gives meaning to belonging. Without it, belonging means more or less nothing.” These moments demonstrate how the failure to achieve recognition generates what Ahmed [46] calls the affective experience of “being out of place”—a sensation that is both cognitive and bodily.

Anas’s extended reflection captures the emotional weight of being “out of place,” as well as the yearning for what Anzaldúa [30] terms a “new mestiza consciousness” (p. 77)—one capable of reconciling past and future selves:

“I didn’t see myself as a migrant; I came here to study and go back home... I am well established in the food business but still looking to come back to academia, to what I call a career. So, you ask me if I am fulfilled, no I am not.”

The ache in this statement expresses not only professional frustration but also a refusal to relinquish an imagined future self. Here, affect acts as a bridge between present conditions and a hoped-for horizon. Anas was not alone in this. Similarly, Rabee refused to apply for refugee status when he struggled to secure employment, saying “that was not an option.” For him, employment and recognition were inseparable. He spoke of wanting to return to Syria but only if he could maintain his connection with the UK, much like Ramy earlier:

“If the situation was not there, I would not think of staying here, at all. But with the situation there … I have opportunities from private universities asking me to go there. I would think about it, rather than working here and maybe my belonging is there. I work here and maybe visit there. Many Syrians are trying to resolve their scholarship issues to be able to visit. So here is giving you security in work, because we admit that corruption there does not allow you to progress, while here if you are working, you are progressing, you are doing something with impact. But I’d like to be able to communicate, and go, and visit, and come back.”

For Rabee, work in the UK was tied to dignity, a striking contrast to the corruption and stagnation of working life in Syria. In the UK, he was not only working but evolving; work carried impact, and therefore, he had impact.

Between home and exile, work functioned as a kind of borderland, bridging old and new selves. The ‘old’ selves still longed for the homeland, while the ‘new’ selves recognised the possibilities for transformation that work in the UK afforded. Those who were professionally fulfilled tended to experience greater rootedness and connection to the UK; those who felt deskilled often continued to identify more strongly with the homeland. In both cases, belonging was tenuous—lived in the in-between spaces of the borderlands.

4.4. Borderlands of Belonging: Work as an Affective Terrain (Contextual Reading)

Set against broader patterns of migration and labour precarity, our partners’ stories depict work as a borderland—neither home nor exile, but a space of friction where inclusion and exclusion intersect. Rabee observed that “feeling accepted professionally becomes a good alternative to being accepted socially,” naming a pragmatic compromise. This echoes Anzaldúa’s [30] view of the borderlands as “a vague and undetermined place” where survival requires “tolerance for ambiguity.” For Rabee and others, work became a way to inhabit that ambiguity—to live both inside and outside at once.

AH resisted allowing work to define his belonging: “Work is work”; yet he also admitted, “I’m still on the surface.” This ambivalence mirrors Ahmed’s [41,62] notion of the strange body, the racialised or migrant body that becomes the object of anxiety and is made to feel conditional, even when admitted into a space. Refusing to over-identify with work as a marker of worth may thus serve as a protective gesture against the pain of exclusion.

Our narrative partners occupied multiple and shifting positions along this borderland: some embraced work as identity (Rabee, Joud, Lily, Fadi), others endured it as necessity (Nawaf, Ramy), and still others inhabited its conditional promise (AH, Anas, Naya). Alexandra offered yet another position: “My belonging is to the household rather than to the country. Wherever I am, I could feel I belong.” Her orientation reminds us that belonging need not map onto the nation or even the workplace, but onto more intimate, relational spaces.

Across these narratives, work emerged as a powerful axis of identity and belonging. For many, professional roles provided continuity and self-worth amid the dislocation of forced migration. Lily reflected, “I’m not sure whether I define myself as a pharmacist or a cell biologist,” placing work at the centre of her identity. Rabee’s narrative, too, was framed entirely through work, which served as his primary source of coherence and value. AH, by contrast, articulated a more cautious stance: “I don’t think the work will change the belonging.” Yet even he conceded, “If I have stable work, a family… that will affect [the belonging], I’m not sure, maybe… I’m still floating.” His language captures the liminality [62,84] of the borderlands. As Anzaldúa [30] writes, the borderlands are “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.” AH inhabits this residue:

“I try to sink into this society, I can’t… I go back to sink deep into [Syrian] society again. But I’m still on the surface. Should I change my name? No. I like my name… Changing your name means changing your identity… I want to be accepted in this society without changing my identity.”

This refusal is a quiet act of defiance, an assertion of dignity in a context where difference can feel risky. Belonging, in this sense, is not about erasure but about recognition on one’s own terms. Work offers potential stability, but deeper forms of acceptance remain conditional. Belonging is both a labour and a longing. Joud echoed this sentiment when reflecting on multiple unsuccessful job applications. He suspected that employers judged his “foreign-sounding” name and dismissed his applications. AH expressed a similar anxiety:

“To feel you are a part of this country, to feel that you really really belong to this country, that’s the acceptance I want. My name is AH—that name is not from this country, does it matter when I apply for a job? Not a local name, not an English name. What is the reaction? I say my name. Foreign, immigrant. [pause].”

This is a subtle yet powerful reminder of affective borders, those boundaries that names, bodies, and biographies cannot easily cross. While work promises integration, it is also a site where ideological borders are reproduced and intimately felt.

Anas described similar dynamics when seeking housing and spoke about repeated job rejections, attributing them to prejudice:

“When I was looking to rent a flat, every time someone sees my Syrian passport I get rejected. I don’t know why. Is it only me? I know some Syrians who managed to rent. Every time I showed my passport, they turned me down. It’s still subjective, though. It all boils down to how the other person sees you, depending on their experience. A lot of people had a lot of prejudice, you can tell from the questions they were asking me. For example, most would you cope with this and that? How is your language? Would you be able to chat with customers? Of course I can do that! Otherwise, I wouldn’t have come this far! So a lot of questions were not about me being fit for the job; it really was about whether I could achieve the basics they require. Although if they’d hired me, I would have achieved a lot more than what they’d expected.”

Whether seen as identity, transaction, or potential anchor, work was never neutral. It was a battleground where partners sought visibility but often encountered erasure. In these borderlands, belonging was not a destination but a negotiation, a process aligned with Anzaldúa’s call to “develop a tolerance for contradictions” and to live with nepantla, the space in-between. This negotiation unfolded not only with the new society but within the self.

Throughout our conversation with Joud, he was adamant that bias shaped the job application and interview process, believing that his Syrianness partly explained the rejections he faced. The “off” feeling he described during interviews—responding to “very basic questions” from panel members, followed by immediate rejection—left him questioning his abilities, his personality, and even his identity. This perception of bias was echoed by other partners, though its perceived origins varied. Adam, for instance, attributed such bias to misconceptions rather than malice. He believed that building relationships helped others to see him as, in his words, “a normal human being,” rather than an “extremist Middle Easterner”:

“Most people I met, after having gotten to know them better, I would ask them about what they thought and they say the first time they hear Syria they’re a bit, mmm, but then they realise I am just a normal human being. This is the reaction of the local people here. They don’t know much or they do but they only know half of the story. People have told me. For example, I am interacting with somebody who is so different from me, he may be seen as normal by his community in his culture, but to me he might not be because of all of our differences. When you meet somebody, you might have this idea implanted in your head beforehand, all the misconceptions, and then you start interacting with them and you think, wait a second, I can be myself with them. That is what I meant by normal. People have these ideas because of the media. For example, they imagine that all the Middle East is extremist or would be offended by everything.”

Deskilling also emerged as a significant theme in our partners’ narratives. For some, the experience of being underemployed was accompanied by disappointment but also by a measure of defiance. AH voiced particular frustration at doing work unrelated to his professional training:

“I don’t want to finish my life working in retail. That’s not really what I studied for. My skills would be better for the specialisation I’m studying. Not to work in retail. I’m an architect, I’m a planner, I can deal with development plans for cities. Absolutely, to do jobs that match my skills would really make my life better.”

A similar sentiment was shared by Alexandra, whose job diverged from her academic background:

“This council job is very easy. I enjoyed the training, though. I have learned so much about autism, learning difficulties, I met new people, I made new friends. It was not challenging though, not stimulating, it’s degrading actually sometimes. Doing what I am doing with the Council, sometimes I get people looking down on who I am, saying ‘why am I doing that job? You know, you can do that job with a high school degree really.’ So people assume that whoever is doing my job would not be highly skilled or qualified like me.”

Anas also reflected:

“Let me count them for you. [Silence... counting applications] 20 something applications and 3 interviews. After that, you know you have to undersell yourself, one way or another. You apply for a job but you’re overqualified ... I mentioned nothing about me doing a Ph.D.”

He elaborated on the dissonance between jobs he wanted and jobs he obtained, and how his degree was not enough [85]:

“If you want to go into a job, you need to make sure you are taking that direction in your life. And you are building up a career. I didn’t find that in meter reading or working as a driver. Those were strategic options, tactics if you must. I was just making ad hoc decisions. I didn’t see myself doing those jobs long term.”

For others, like Alexandra and AH, work remained ambivalent, facilitating integration but not guaranteeing deeper belonging. For some, work was purely functional. Nawaf stated pragmatically: “No need to feel integrated. Just doing the job.” However, Juliette described how employment allowed her to learn about local culture: “You learn what they do at the weekend… you understand how people live.” Yet the emotional residue of war and displacement continued to shape how partners inhabited work. AH spoke of feeling “on the surface” and “out of place,” his body in a state of “constant floating,” while Alexandra echoed: “I feel I am floating out of my body and doing [the belonging]; it’s not me any longer.”

Work, like the borderland itself, was both wounding and generative: a site of contradiction but also of potential transformation. These embodied experiences resonate with Ahmed’s [62] concept of the strange body, illustrating how bodies marked as migrant or racialised are made to feel out of place. Even when permitted entry, their belonging remains conditional. Highly skilled Syrian migrants thus navigate not only the UK labour market but the ongoing violence of borders—carried in bodies, names, and biographies.

5. Discussion: Bordering Beyond Victimhood

Our analysis set out to understand how highly skilled Syrians in the UK navigate borders that do not end at arrival but linger, sedimenting in work experiences, bodies, and everyday encounters. While our theoretical framework emphasised the affective border—as an emotional, embodied, and relational phenomenon—the narratives revealed that this bordering is not always experienced as unrelenting constraint. Instead, our partners’ accounts oscillated between waiting [86], frustration, pride, and hope, reflecting the ambivalence of being simultaneously included and excluded, celebrated and suspected.

As our partners described, the border manifests in the ordinary: their accents, their foreign-sounding names, their “Middle Easternness” [20] and the suspicion and exception [21,22] these bring about. Yet these moments did not simply confirm exclusion and “living on borders and in margins” [30] (p. 48) as Anzaldua argues; they also generated new spaces of negotiation and intentional border-crossing. Adam, for instance, reflected on how initial bias dissolved once he built relationships at work: “when they know me, they realise I’m just a normal human being.” His account illuminates the affective labour of making oneself “legible,” but also the transformative potential of relational encounters that disarm suspicion. In this sense, the border is felt [30,35] by “the strange body” [41,84] but also reworked through everyday intimacy and resilience.

While much of the literature portrays skilled migrants and refugees as trapped in “existential immobility” [16], our partners stories complicate this. Several experienced deskilling and rejection, but few narrated their journeys solely through loss and limbo. Rather, their accounts often turned toward agency and self-definition. AH’s frustration about working in retail despite being an architect was underpinned by refusal. His and others’ insistence is affectively charged: frustration becomes a form of critique, a way of resisting the border’s quiet violence by asserting one’s right to recognition.

The border, then, is not simply imposed; it is lived and resisted. Our Syrian partners described how they re-applied for the same job and rewrote CVs, trying and retrying. Yet they also voiced pride in their adaptability and creativity, practices that reframed precarity as competence. Their UK education, while not a full equaliser, offered cultural fluency and linguistic ease that helped some traverse these affective boundaries more confidently. Still, belonging was never easily granted or obtained; it was negotiated, often emotionally and repeatedly. The emphasis on feeling in their accounts points to belonging as not merely structural but affective, an embodied state achieved when one’s skills, personhood and place finally align.

To speak of “borders crossing us,” as Anzaldúa suggests, is to acknowledge this internalisation: the border moves inward, shaping self-perception and emotional texture. But as our narratives show, Syrians also respond to this crossing. They contest the pity often projected onto refugees, reframe displacement as professional challenge, and create meaning and a “community of value” [60] through work that sustains dignity and identity. In doing so, they practice what we call: bordering beyond victimhood, transforming bordering from a mechanism of exclusion into a field of agency and negotiation, critique, and sometimes hope.

Work opened doors for belonging. Partners spoke of “working in and for their cities” [87] describing how employment connected them to the civic fabric of London, Birmingham, or Edinburgh. In this vein, and in seeking to understand migrant experiences of work, we might follow Anzaldúa’s [30] notion of el bocacalle—the crossroads where the dominant and the marginalised meet. Work, for our partners, was precisely such a crossroads: a frictional yet generative space where marginalisation and exclusion were reproduced but also contested. Through work, they refused isolation, performed solidarity, and asserted agency. The recurrent phrase “we, Syrians” signalled more than nationality; it articulated a collective consciousness shaped by struggle and aspiration, an insistence on being more than the refugee condition and actively “feeling at home” despite being “out of place” [63].

Crucially, this refusal to be confined by imposed identities or structural constraints is not merely a theoretical proposition but a lived, embodied practice, one that can only take form within the frictional spaces of the borderlands. In this sense, work can be seen as a site of political and imaginative resistance. Rather than reproducing existing hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion, work enables borderland subjects to contest systemic oppression and allowing the migrant body to take shape through the new direction it faces [63]. Reframing dominant narratives about mobility, citizenship and value. As Anzaldúa reminds us, the path from reaction to action must be carved not through the master’s tools, but through the creation of new teorías—ways of knowing and being that arise from the margins.

Bringing these insights into conversation with our methodological approach, the notion of the affective border became both an analytic and interpretive lens. The Listening Guide enabled us to hear how borders are not only narrated but voiced, in the hesitations, tonal shifts, repetitions, and silences that punctuate partners’ speech. The embodied nature of bordering was often audible: a quickened rhythm when recounting rejection, a softening of tone or a smile when describing moments of recognition. Listening in this way made affect analytically visible. It allowed us to trace how belonging was performed through voice—sometimes steady and assured, sometimes faltering under the weight of uncertainty—revealing how the border is lived as both spatial and emotional terrain.

This “voice-centred” approach thus moved beyond extracting data; it became a relational act of care and accountability. The affective dimensions of work—anxiety, pride, fatigue, and hope—emerged precisely because the method foregrounded emotional cadence as meaning-making, not background noise. Through multiple “listenings,” we could hear how our narrative partners resisted pity, refused reduction to victimhood, and positioned themselves as professionals with agency. Silences were equally revealing: pauses when discussing discrimination, laughter masking discomfort, or deflection when recounting loss. Rather than treating these as absences, we interpreted them as gestures of control and self-preservation, acts of bordering the self against vulnerability.

This methodological attentiveness also allowed us to see how belonging, for many, was not a stable destination but a practice continually enacted through work, paid and voluntary. Through their stories, we see how Syrians perform a double orientation: toward recognition by others and toward self-recognition in exile. The Listening Guide helped us trace this movement, a process of reorientation that echoes Ahmed’s [62] idea of bodies navigating spaces “not built for them.” The act of listening, then, was itself decolonial: it displaced extractive research norms and created a dialogical space where meaning was co-constructed rather than imposed, and importantly, remain open to interpretation, rather than fixed or final. Through our method, we were able to capture what might be termed ‘hopeful borderings’, the everyday gestures of persistence and connection that disrupt dominant narratives of exclusion. Rather than reinforcing despair, our approach illuminated how partners reclaimed meaning and professional identity within constraining structures.

In this way, the Listening Guide did more than structure our analysis; it became a decolonial act of listening that acknowledged partners’ agency and the unfinished, affective nature of their journeys. Our method was not separate from theory but embodied it. By listening relationally, we could hear how borders are carried in the body, as tension, pride, humour, and care, and how affect circulates between researcher and participant-turned-partner. This made the analysis not only more reflexive but more ethically grounded, attuned to the relational politics of telling and being heard.

6. Conclusions

In view of the above discussion, the study answers the research questions in nuanced ways. Firstly, crossing a border when mobility gives way to emplacement is experienced as both constraint and negotiation. Partners navigate a terrain of suspended possibilities, where legal, professional, and affective borders intersect. Emplacement does not erase the border; it transforms mobility into a lived condition of negotiation and resilience, producing both emotional burden and opportunities for agency. Lastly, borders persisting within racialised migrant bodies are manifested through embodied experiences. These affective borders shape feelings of legitimacy, belonging, and professional identity. Yet, our partners actively resist internalisation of imposed identities, using work and relational networks to contest structural and epistemic exclusion. The border is therefore both felt and reworked, a terrain of constraint and creative possibility.

In this sense, the shared struggle to re-define and re-emplace the self in the aftermath of war and displacement, rather than the unifying trope of victimhood, becomes the terrain upon which solidarities are forged and the lived meanings of migration are more fully understood. Through a decolonial empirical examination of highly skilled Syrians’ narratives, this article makes a broader contribution to the conceptualisation of migrant work by applying a framework combining Ahmed’s affect theory and Anzaldua’s theory of borderlands, within a broader decolonial framing that acknowledges the ethical and methodological value of a human-centred approach to inquiry. The study brings into sharp relief the recognition of borders as not merely lines of division but potential sites of becoming, where interconnected webs of resistance and relationality can emerge. Work, in this reimagining, also becomes a shared site of becoming: a means of negotiating visibility on one’s own terms and of journeying from the margins toward a centre that might still define the migrant as “other” but allows for a reimagining of that “otherness”. Work emerges as both survival and theory: a lived practice of bordering beyond victimhood that redefines what it means to belong, to contribute, and to imagine otherwise.