Between Care and Precarity: the talk

The question

How do creative arts facilitators working with refugees and sanctuary seekers in the UK understand and enact the role of art in shaping refugee narratives, wellbeing and policy?

Three parts to it: what facilitators do, what they see their work doing, and what conditions just practice actually requires.

1. The landscape this work happens in

The talk opened with the policy context, because it is the ground everything else stands on. The hostile environment announced in 2012. The Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016. The Nationality and Borders Act 2022, creating a two-tier system by mode of arrival. The Illegal Migration Act 2023. And in November 2025, the shift to temporary protection on the Denmark model, pushing settlement out to as long as twenty years with status reviewed every thirty months.

Creative health has been recognised in UK policy across exactly the same period.

The two run alongside each other, and they rarely meet. That gap is where the people in this study work.

2. What the literature already covers, and does not

A systematic search across eleven databases. Taking one as representative:

And it is not because nobody is working on this. The field is growing fast: 417 PubMed records and 4,537 on ScienceDirect across 2015 to 2025, climbing nearly every year.

The evidence base documents what art does for refugees and sanctuary seekers. It does not ask the people who make it happen.

3. How the study was built

Interpretivist and qualitative, after depth and meaning rather than frequency. A phenomenological sensibility drawing on interpretative phenomenological analysis. Reflexive thematic analysis after Braun and Clarke, which is explicit that themes are constructed by the researcher rather than lying in the data waiting to be found.

Two years embedded at Counterpoints Arts, which shaped access and trust, and which shaped interpretation too. Trauma-informed throughout. A reflexive diary recording assumptions at every analytic decision.

What was collected, July to October 2025:

Eighteen practitioners in total. Ten of them in the two focus groups, both held at Counterpoints. Four visual artists, four community arts facilitators, three in theatre, three in music, two writers, two dancers. Six with lived experience of forced migration, twelve allied professionals.

Analysis followed Braun and Clarke's six phases. Coding in NVivo produced over a hundred initial codes, clustered into candidate themes, reviewed against the whole dataset, and refined. Four themes survived.

4. The four findings

Each one is a tension rather than a headline: something facilitation makes possible, and something current structures take away.

Empowerment, and structural fragmentation

Art lets people take part without having to speak, reclaim a body and a sense of time, and rebuild a self that bureaucracy interrupted. One participant, an illustrator, spent four years in limbo waiting on the Home Office and could not make any art at all. When his status stabilised he described an exclusive period of creativity that helped him get back on track.

What interrupts it: short-term funding, emotional labour nobody counts, and evaluation metrics that decide in advance what is allowed to count.

"Non-verbal communication, image making, art making. It's an instant tap into the psyche and an instant tap into how that person is feeling."

Belonging, and uneven access

Belonging gets built through optionality, and one facilitator put the design principle plainly: you do not have to talk about your pain to belong.

What limits it: networks, money, translation, and a mismatch between what institutions recognise and how communities already make things. One facilitator worked with a group of Afghan women more keen to learn English than to do art, so she worked through embroidery instead, because that was what they would naturally do.

A cultural barrier is rarely a refusal to be creative. It is usually a programme designed around the wrong kind of making.

"You don't have to talk about your pain to belong."

Narrative agency, and commodification

Facilitators help people author and complicate their own stories and push back against hostile framings in the press.

What constrains it: funders and media reward the simple version, the before and after, and complicated lives get compressed into a success story. When the work is framed as helping refugees, the narrative centres the helper rather than the community that was already there.

"The white saviour complex. This kind of hero narrative. I provide a service, and I completely burn myself out."

Community-led care, and resource precarity

The strongest practice spreads authority across a room rather than holding it at the front. Co-design. Shared authorship. One facilitator described what she called vulnerable leadership, and gave the example of running a session lying down when she was exhausted, and the group bringing the energy that day instead.

What threatens it: this model needs continuity, and continuity is what the sector most reliably fails to fund.

"The facilitator. Someone like me who makes the extra things happen. We're the most vulnerable because we're not protected."

5. What the anonymous polling showed

Both focus groups used Mentimeter alongside discussion.

Asked how their combined work influences public understanding of refugees and migration, facilitators selected raises awareness, changes perceptions and encourages empathy. Not one selected any option implying neutrality or no impact.

Asked to rate art's impact on mental health and community resilience, both groups sat in the top two points of the scale, with two caveats the participants raised themselves: art works best alongside other support rather than instead of it, and introduced too early it can surface more than a person is ready to hold.

6. The contradiction

Art is described as a low-cost public good. It is low-cost because the people who deliver it are subsidising it themselves, with their own money, their own time, and their own health.

This is the finding that holds all four themes together, and it was the note the talk built towards.

7. Five recommendations

1. Fund longer. Move from short project cycles to longer-term, fairer funding that lets trust and continuity form.
2. Measure differently. Value relational and community outcomes rather than metrics that distort the practice they claim to assess.
3. Share the story. Share ownership and authorship with the people whose stories they are.
4. Protect the worker. Supervision and support, as any other role holding this much distress would have.
5. Recognise the skill. Facilitation is skilled labour, and lived experience is knowledge.

Mapped in the slides to six named barriers, with the actors best placed to act on each: Arts Council England, DHSC and OHID, trusts and foundations, NHS England and Primary Care Networks, the Centre for Cultural Value, employers and sector bodies, and the Home Office.

8. What the study offers, and what it cannot claim

Presented plainly, because naming the limits is part of the argument.

What it offers. Practitioner knowledge taken first-hand. An intersection almost nobody occupies. Depth no survey reaches. Insider access that bought candour. Six barriers mapped to six actions a funder can act on.

What it cannot claim. Eighteen participants is qualitative depth, not statistical representativeness, and nothing here generalises to the sector. Fifteen of eighteen are London or South England based. The researcher was embedded with the partner organisation for two years, which produced trust and also shaped interpretation; a reflexive diary documents that, it does not remove it. Fourteen participants came through one network, which shapes who was reachable and who was not.

In closing

Creative facilitation offers real routes to agency, belonging and voice. Only where the conditions of the work are themselves just and sustainable.

The slides

The full presentation is available to download. It carries the complete search funnel, the methodology and ethics in detail, the thematic maps for all four findings, the polling results, the barrier-to-action tables, and an appendix containing all 71 participant quotes from the study.

Every quote is also published, searchable, in the quote set on this site.

All participants are pseudonymised. Every quote is published with consent under UCL ethics approval. This material describes real people's experiences of displacement and of mental ill health. Please cite with care.

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Download the full presentation, 49 slides, including all 71 participant quotes.
Between Care and Precarity, the slides, PDF
The searches, the topic guides and the poll outputs behind the talk are in the research appendices. Every quote is also searchable in the quote set.