Embodiment and dignity: Asylum migrants’ experiences of (mis)recognised personhood in everyday encounters

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a narrative ethnography that explores asylum migrants’ everyday experiences of embodied encounters, tracing concrete situations and processes in which they are either affirmed or denied recognition as persons. Empathy – understood as the capacity to understand the experiences of others – is identified as a central dynamic in the recognition of personhood. We approach this through the lens of Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, which grounds the study in the premise that recognition of personhood in embodied encounters enables one to exist as a human being with dignity. Conversely, its absence can give rise to acts that disregard human worth and result in violations of dignity. To access the first-hand experiences of our participants, we developed analytical tools informed by the methodology of dialogical-hermeneutic empathy and the concept of empathic unsettlement, as well as Jay Bernstein’s Plessner-inspired conception of dignity as emerging from the delicate balance between voluntary embodied agency and experienced involuntary embodiment. Our analysis presents both dignifying and undignifying embodied encounters as reported by asylum migrants. The latter are presented under three themes: implicit expressions of misrecognised personhood, undignification through sympathetic performativity, and the instrumentalization of empathy. Based on this analysis, we argue that a more ‘human and humane approach’ to migration necessitates attentiveness to the myriad everyday moments in which migrants are either affirmed or denied dignity as persons.

Keywords

asylum migration embodiment encounters dignity empathy unsettlement narrative ethnography

Introduction

In an interview held in his office in October 2023 regarding asylum-migrants’ experiences of embodied everyday encounters, Adil, a person with refugee background working as a support aide, described an encounter in a bar close to his home. As Adil entered the bar, he was addressed by a group of local residents who knew each other and were already a little drunk. Quickly the encounter took a hostile tone:

So they see me. I’m just like, oh, they are drunk. And they ask me, what’s your name. I said my name is Adil. They say, Mohammed. I said no, my name is Adil. They say Mohammed. Then one of them said, well, you are coming here to fuck people and everything. I said, why are you speaking with me like this?

Intimidated by the hostile atmosphere, Adil threatened to call the police. This did not change the situation. The group moved on, leaving Adil feeling puzzled and anxious. Collecting his courage, he decided to continue the evening at the bar:

Then I went to the bar. I ordered one beer. I start drinking the beer, then some of those people, they come near me and ask me, oh you are drinking. I say, yes, I am drinking, what’s the problem? They said, no problem. So you are a good one.

The above interview excerpts provide an example of a ‘violation of dignity’, which is discussed in this paper in the context of embodied encounters. It refers to acts that undermine or disregard the inherent worth and value of an individual (or group). This violation can take various forms, such as verbal abuse, discrimination, humiliation, harassment, exploitation, or any action that causes physical, emotional, or psychological harm that diminishes the person’s sense of self-respect and integrity, often in situations where people are socially positioned through hierarchy. We argue that such violations are commonplace in asylum migrants’¹ everyday lives and that they usually reflect the lack of empathy in their encounters with other people.

Recent research suggests that it is not uncommon for people in asylum situations to find their personhood and self-worth being challenged in ways detrimental to their wellbeing, agency, and capacity to act (Gökarıksel and Secor, 2020; Mitchell and Sparke, 2020). Moreover, it has been found that such violations typically occur in embodied encounters, whether with state officials, aid organisations, local people, or other migrants (Hodge, 2019; Ramakrishnan and Stavinoha, 2024). These encounters can be situated in the broader context of increasing hostility towards migrants, in Europe and beyond (Campos-Delgado and Côté-Boucher, 2024; Häkli et al., 2024; Häkli and Kallio, 2021; Ilcan et al., 2023; Morgan, 2024), which spills over from policies and state-level bordering into what Yuval-Davis et al. (2018) call “everyday bordering”: the policing of belonging undertaken by individuals and institutions on behalf of the state. This draws attention to the vulnerable embodied existence of migrants under various forms of social control.

Building on these debates, the paper presents findings from a study that explores asylum migrants embodied experiences of encounters with others, including ourselves, in different everyday life contexts. Through ethnographic research, we have sought to create a better understanding of the situations and processes in which refugees find themselves valued or devalued as persons. To focus explicitly on the embodied dimensions of dignity and its violations, we turn to Helmuth Plessner’s (2019) thinking on personhood that pieces together embodied existence and culturally mediated sense of self-worth. Jay Bernstein (2015) has used Plessnerian thought in his theorisation of human dignity, which we find useful in analysing asylum migrants’ experiences as (mis)recognised embodied personhood. For that, we have identified empathy – the ability to understand the other’s experiences – as a central dynamism in the recognition of personhood (Honneth, 2008). Moreover, Adri Smaling’s (2007) approach of dialogical-hermeneutical empathy and Dominick LaCapra’s (2014) concept of empathic unsettlement are helpful in exploring the firsthand experiences of our participants. The analysis focuses on what happens and is communicated in embodied encounters in which people (mis)recognise each other as persons.

In the next section we describe the study design and the research methods, which is followed by two sections that introduce our theoretical approach. The analysis is organised under two themes: dignified and undignified experiences. In the conclusion we summarise our findings and our contribution to the interdisciplinary research that analyses forced migration from embodied perspectives.

Studying embodied encounters with asylum migrants

Our study is based in one urban context in Finland. In the city and its neighbouring towns, the average percentage of migrants is about 4% of the population, but in some of the urban areas the migrant population approaches 20% (Tilastokeskus, 2024)². The municipality provides a variety of integration services, including language and basic education, employment advice, and specialist health and mental health services. The city also hosts a reception centre. Moreover, over a dozen NGOs providing services to migrants operate in the area.

Methodologically, the study follows a narrative ethnographic approach. Epistemologically we understand narratives as means for people to interpret, select and order their experiences and hence create through them a sense of self (Bruner, 1991). Narratives are stories about experiences and our analysis follows Andrews’ and colleagues (2025) approach that pays attention to the content, structure, audiences, and context of the telling of these everyday stories. While narrative research makes no direct claim of being ethical, it allows participants to direct and select their stories, gives them a possibility to voice their own interpretation of their experiences and represent themselves (Esin and Lounasmaa, 2020). Narrative arts-based methods can help connect with migrant participants as they allow working across linguistic and cultural divides (Esin, 2017; Fathi and Nasimi, 2023; Lounasmaa et al., 2020; Vacchelli, 2018). Storytelling is present in our ethnographic encounters and interviews with the participants, where they tell ‘small stories’ about their experiences as asylum migrants and relate them to grand narratives about migrants and migration (Bamberg and Georgeakoupoulou, 2008). Narrative also emerges as a tool for ethnographic notetaking and sense-making: we notice the ethnographic field notes often emerging in a story-format, recalling some of the master-narratives and political stories – both existing and possible ones – that present themselves in the context of the analysis (Andrews, 2013).

The ethnographic encounters took place over 18 months, in 2022–2024. Altogether the team spent approximately 300 hours in research activities, with Lounasmaa carrying out most of the fieldwork including volunteering. Although this took the shape of doing ethnography “at Home” (Anderson, 2021), there was never any doubt of the outsider status of the ethnographer in relation to the experiences of the participants. We made the decision not to recruit participants through reception centres to avoid being associated as part of the immigration regime (Puumala, 2016), but the ethnographer was always marked in the encounters as Finnish, intersectionally different from participants (Baker, 2024); a person with means and authority to help – an empathetic outsider. The research relationship, built on trust, endeavours to create the kind of encounters where dignity is recognised consistently (Esin and Lounasmaa, 2020). We did this by recognising our outsider status, paying attention to the “discomfort and unease caused by shifting power relations” (Anderson, 2021: 213), being careful of making any assumptions about privileged knowledge and instead of rushing to help participants and assuming we know what they need – employing “ethical hesitancy” (Kofoed and Staunaes, 2015).

Many of the activities we introduced had artistic and playful elements, as we found that challenging topics and experiences are more easily dealt with in what Martha Nussbaum calls “play space”. The term refers to conditions where one can “experiment with the idea of otherness in ways that are less threatening than the direct encounter with another may often be, [offering] invaluable practice in empathy and reciprocity” (Nussbaum 2012: 97). Nussbaum suggests that play space helps connect “the experiences of vulnerability and surprise to curiosity and wonder, rather than to crippling anxiety” (ibid.: 98). Any form of art can be used to create this kind of space, but of course people enter it in different ways.

We observed and participated in arts- and movement-based workshops conducted by art therapists, museum visits and tours designed for migrants, arts-based workshops at educational institutions with adult migrant learners, and family art-making sessions.³ In addition to arts-based activities, the fieldwork included interviews with people working in NGOs and different state and municipal provided services, visits to educational institutions engaging in training for adult migrants, participant observation in NGOs and activities organised by the integration and cultural services of the city, conversation classes in Finnish led by the ethnographer, accompanying migrants to appointments and daily activities, informal discussions in different ethnographic situations, and interviews with our key participants.

We also organised two improvisation theatre courses together with an experienced instructor.⁴ The classes involved asylum migrants with and without refugee status, migrants without refugee background as well as some local people. We had both male and female participants attending the courses, of different ages (mostly adults), with a broad variety of cultural and national backgrounds (Kurdish, Iranian, Syrian, Taiwanese, Sierra Leonean, Somalian, Indian, Peruvian, Ingrian). Each course attracted approximately 20 different participants, most of whom were of migrant background and up to half asylum migrants. We worked multi-lingually, where Finnish was prioritised as enhancing language skills offered an incentive for many participants. All exercises and responses were translated either by the ethnographer to English or sometimes French, or by other participants to the multiple languages present in the groups.

The interviews were audio recorded, the observations and informal encounters were recorded in research notes and diaries, and some of the activities were photographed, audio-recorded or filmed. Physical art pieces or photos of them, and other co-created materials, were collected. Informed consent and permission were requested for each instance, and the research was evaluated by the University’s ethics committee. While we aim to always guard the anonymity of the participants, the level of connection and intimacy in this kind of research means that individual stories we were presented with are so singular that some of them are impossible to completely anonymise. For this reason, we refer to the participants with pseudonyms and refrain from presenting anyone’s life story as whole. The data is broken down into smaller fragments, disconnected from the whole, and removed from its original context where appropriate. While we have the participants’ permission to share the information we present, we feel a responsibility to protect them from any unforeseen or unintended consequences. Our ethical research practices also include following up with participants after difficult encounters, staying with them, listening, offering help with practical tasks and checking in regularly.

Dignity as recognised embodied personhood

Asylum seekers are frequently subjected to dehumanisation in their encounters with various actors, including immigration authorities, policymakers, and members of the host society. They may face detention in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, separation from family members, or the denial of basic rights and services (Doidge and Sandri, 2019; Mitchell and Sparke, 2020). They may be reduced to statistics, labelled as “illegal immigrants”, or treated as a homogeneous group rather than as individuals with unique stories and needs (Häkli et al., 2024; Ilcan et al., 2023; Ramakrishnan and Stavinoha, 2024). Furthermore, the asylum process itself can be dehumanising, requiring individuals to recount traumatic experiences in a detached and bureaucratic manner, often without adequate support or understanding from decision-makers (Canzutti and Aradau, 2024; Häkli and Kallio, 2021; Morgan, 2024).

To understand asylum migrants’ experiences of encounters with others, we draw on Helmuth Plessner’s (2019) philosophical anthropology and Jay Bernstein (2015) Plessner-inspired thinking about human dignity as recognised personhood. Both draw attention to personhood as an embodied social existence: we have no choice but to inhabit our realities as embodied persons (Plessner, 2019). Addressing dignity and moral injury, Bernstein (2015) further argues that morals are not abstract principles, but rather expressions of mutual dependence and vulnerability as embodied human beings. He also claims that dignity is not an intrinsic human quality but rather results from and depends on being recognised as a person by others (Bernstein, 2015). For Riessman (2008), who understands relationality through narratives, this recognition means being heard; having your story listened to and accepted.

Personhood, embodiment and dignity are all familiar concepts in migration studies, but few works bring them together in the way Plessner and Bernstein do. Bernstein’s (2015) Plessnerian ideas help in understanding how crucial role embodiment plays in migrants’ experiences of vulnerability and devaluation. Experiencing the world through their bodies, asylum migrants often face physical dangers during their journeys, including exposure to harsh environments, lack of adequate shelter, and the risk of trauma and violence. These experiences can undermine their agency and self-respect and expose them to the violation of their dignity (Gilodi et al., 2022; Kallio and Häkli, 2023; Latham-Sprinkle et al., 2019).

While Bernstein (2015) suggests that moral injury can only be healed by restoring the victim’s dignity and humanity, he underlines that dignity is not a fixed or innate attribute in humans. He rather argues that it is a dynamic and relational process that can be sustained and defended through embodied agency. The idea is based on his reading of Plessner’s (2019) thought on human embodiment as consisting of both voluntary and involuntary aspects of the human body. By the voluntary body Bernstein (2015: 202) refers to actions that are intentional in relation to our bodily being and comportment: “my voluntary body is the instrumentalization of my bodily life for the sake of its living purposes”. When we act intentionally based on our values, considerations, and social expectations, we affirm our capacity for agency and self-determination as recognised by others. Voluntary actions play a crucial role in shaping our sense of self-worth and dignity.

Following Plessner (2019), Bernstein (2015) recognises that our bodies are not entirely under our control. Many bodily processes occur involuntarily, beyond our conscious influence. Examples of involuntary functions include heartbeat, digestion, reflexes, and blushing, as well as bodily actions such as intuitively correcting one’s posture, nervously tapping one’s fingers, or trembling in anger. These bodily enactments operate independently of our will, often triggered by aspects of how we experience social life.

According to Bernstein (2015), our vulnerability lies in the fact that we simultaneously make voluntary choices and experience involuntary bodily functions. Because our bodies are the vessels through which we engage with the world, express ourselves, and experience life, for Bernstein (2015) dignity emerges from the delicate balance between voluntary embodied agency and experienced involuntary embodiment. For example, when we are hungry, we usually fulfil our need to feed our bodies in a controlled and socially acceptable way, rather than grabbing whatever edible we come across and eating it as quickly as possible. By balancing the involuntary and voluntary aspects of our embodiment, we seek recognition as persons not primarily defined by hunger. Our dignity, then, is determined by how we navigate our embodied existence, and how our personhood is perceived by those whose recognition our dignity depends on.

Bernstein’s account of personhood has been criticised of its emphasis on dignity as a recognised achievement. As, Brennan (2019) notes, Bernstein’s thinking is unable to account for why those who lack the ability to bodily performance that shows self-conscious resolution of voluntary and involuntary embodiment may still come to be recognised as humans with dignity. As an example, Brennan (2019) refers to the case of feral child Genie who, when found, lacked almost all characteristics associated with human abilities of a 13-year-old. He rightly points out that those who found Genie nevertheless saw her as a person recognised as having human value. Similar questions could be asked of other human beings who have difficulties in performing voluntary actions related to, for example, disability, illness, and ageing.

To explain why the recognition of personhood and dignity are socially contextual rather than tied to a universal principle, we lean on Honneth (2008), Jardine (2015) and Brennan (2021) who propose that recognition primordially depends on empathy as the contextually embedded understanding of the other’s experience as part of the other’s world. Here recognition rests upon a “stance of empathic engagement in the world” (Honneth, 2008: 38). Recognition of the other’s personhood does not simply happen based on their bodily comportment but depends on what Jardine (2015: 574) calls “elementary recognition” or empathy.

We argue that empathy, as the ability to understand the other’s experience, is what gives us the understanding of what we recognise in the other’s contextually embedded comportment, perceived as embodied personhood. Conversely, the lack of empathy largely accounts for the situations where recognition of personhood and dignity are denied. Empathy is needed as the basis for recognition precisely because “[t]he other is rarely (and perhaps only in pathological cases) given as a mere physical entity, rather her bodily movements and expressive gestures immediately manifest an embodied, engaged and directed subjective life” (Jardine, 2015: 582).

In summary, Jay Bernstein’s (2015) work invites us to appreciate the complexity of human dignity. His thinking foregrounds our bodily experiences and encourages a nuanced understanding of dignity that transcends mere action, embracing both our autonomy and our shared vulnerability as embodied beings. By applying Plessner’s (2019) and Bernstein’s (2015) framework in connection with the empathic approach introduced next, we elucidate the structural and interpersonal factors that contribute to asylum migrants dignifying and undignifying experiences that emerge in mundane or institutional situation where they encounter other people as embodied persons.

Dialogical-hermeneutical empathy and empathic unsettlement

Empathy is the ability to understand other people’s feelings, perspectives, and experiences without having first-person access to them (Stein 1989). It can bridge personal, cultural, and social differences and help build dignified relationships based on understanding and recognition of the other’s personhood. Yet, the relationship between dignity and empathy is intertwined and dynamic.

When people lack the ability, or willingness, to appreciate the perspectives of those who are different from them, they are more likely to violate their dignity inadvertently or deliberately, and resort to assumptions, stereotyping and dismissive othering (Marino, 2022; Pedwell, 2016; Tucker, 2016). Conversely, experienced disrespect of dignity can hinder the ability to empathise with those who are perceived as different. Feeling devalued or marginalised can lead to resentment, mistrust, or a defensive attitude towards others, making it challenging to empathise with their perspectives or experiences. Again, when encounters across alterity are characterised by mutual empathy, where individuals genuinely seek to understand and respect each other, a positive dynamic can emerge that encourages dialogue and the recognition of the dignity and personhood of those involved (Doidge and Sandri, 2019). These dynamics are often analysed in terms of caring relations (Kallio and Häkli, 2019).

The potential for creating a virtuous circle in human interaction has encouraged some scholars to approach empathy as a sensibility and a skill that can be cultivated. Adri Smaling (2007) has developed the methodological idea of dialogical-hermeneutical empathy that involves a reciprocal “process of interpreting, testing, re-interpreting, re-testing” leading to a deepening empathic understanding (ibid: 332). Here interaction between the researcher and research participants is a key instrument. For him empathic understanding “is a checking and validating process [that] also implies self-clarification on the part of the interpreting empathizer because his or her for-understandings or pre-suppositions are being confronted by the behavior [sic]of the researched […] In addition, the other is also interpreting his or her own behavior [sic], thoughts, feelings, etc.” (Smaling, 2007: 335).

This dynamism, where both parties are pushed to change to achieve understanding, means that empathetic encounters are not always merely smooth and pleasant experiences. Encounters across personal, cultural, and social differences often involve what Dominick LaCapra (2014) calls empathic unsettlement. While not using the term, Anzaldúa (2002: 4) aptly states that bridging across alterity should honour people’s otherness “in ways that allow us to be changed by embracing that otherness rather than punishing others for having different views, belief system, skin color [sic], or spiritual practice.” In Marino’s (2022: 589) words, “Empathy is not just about understanding and engaging with others’ experiences; it is also about how these experiences shape one’s world.” (also Pedwell, 2016; Tucker, 2016). In this way embodied encounters across alterity expose people to difference, rupture and surprise that potentially push them to change through empathic relations-building (LaCapra, 2014).

The understanding of empathy as an essential element in social interaction, and as a key aspect in the methodology of human sciences, are brought together by the narrative dimension of empathic understanding. According to Bruner (1991), narratives allow us to make sense of our experiences. By organising experiences into a storied form, we reflect, select, and analyse them, as well as the audiences and contexts we present them in. These stories then become a part of how we see and present ourselves to others, thus carrying potential for social change (Esin and Lounasmaa, 2020). Drawing from Ruthellen Josselson, Smaling (2007: 337) underlines that empathic understanding operates through narratives: “To understand another within the empathic stance means being able to understand their stories” (Josselson, 1995: 32). This communication is created “not only by words, but by tone of voice, expressions, and gestures in the natural flow of a conversation” (Kvale, 1996: 125, cited in Smaling, 2007: 327).

In the following sections we focus on the narratives of our participants, paying attention not only to what they say but also how they express themselves bodily and situationally. We trace indications of their dignifying and undignifying experiences of encounters with others, often across a range of cultural differences. Through “attentive secondary witness”, our analysis aims to understand the other’s position “while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place” (LaCapra, 2014: 82). This approach allowed us to engage with research participants with a particular ethical awareness of the ambiguities that arise in such activities. Like Smaling (2007) and LaCapra (2014), we take seriously the “emotional labour” of empathy (Doidge and Sandri, 2019). It requires that the researchers and the participants open themself up to otherness and can bear with the feelings of unsettlement that enable the exploration of new kinds of relations with others. This has been a central focus in our narrative ethnography where various kinds of empathic relations-building processes have taken place.

Dignifying encounters

When personhood is recognised in an embodied encounter one can exist as who one is, as a person. How this happens in practice does not necessarily attract attention in the ebb and flow of everyday life. However, when one stands out as different and risks being frequently misrecognised as Other, these banal situations become visible and their significance for a dignified life is exposed. We present an example of a dignifying encounter, where the ethnographer was accompanying one of our participants on the tram. He is easily identifiable as Middle Eastern and from his articulation it is clear that he is still learning Finnish. The participant was hence most likely seen by other travellers as an asylum migrant.

With Reza in the tram. He asks about the name of the next stop. I laugh when I understand that he thought it is called ‘tuoli’ (in Finnish ‘chair’), which comes close to the right spelling ‘tulli’ (in Finnish ‘customs’) but changes the meaning completely. Three other Finnish-speaking travellers laugh cheerfully with us. Opposite to us sits an elderly lady, she chuckles and smiles throughout the journey while following our conversation. At the other side of the corridor, a gruff male voice suggests an English translation. Yet Reza does not speak English, so I continue to explain in Finnish. The atmosphere is cheerfully sparkling. (Notebook 1: 41-42)

Here, a sudden connection across alterity is formed through what the travellers together found funny. In contrast to occasions where Middle Eastern young men encounter racist attitudes in public space in Finland (Kallio et al., 2019), the people sitting next to each other created a friendly space where everyone could belong. They found themselves related through the embodied gestures and linguistic fun-making that the research participant initiated with the ethnographer. The primary form of communication was laughter, accompanied by responsive eye contact and relaxed postures; in Kvale’s (1996) words, non-verbal empathic interaction as part of the “natural flow of a conversation”. The deliberate use of humour and the slightly self-deprecating tone that Reza takes here play an important role in the embodied encounter.

By bringing up the tram stop’s name that he found bemusing Reza knew that his partial knowledge of Finnish would come to everyone’s attention. The act can therefore be understood as an invitation to other travellers to empathise with his life situation in which learning Finnish is currently one of the most important things. Revealing his own vulnerability, he opened the door for everyone to be present as persons who can understand each other’s positions as similarly incomplete human beings. In Plessnerian terms, their bodily presence was balanced: bursts of laughter, squinting of the eyes, throwing back the head, sinking into a comfortable sitting position, exchanging amused glances – all these bodily enactments could unfold without anyone expressing discomfort or disagreement in the shared space.

In a separate conversation Reza confirmed that humour and laughter are tools he regularly uses to open up communication with strangers. This tactic is used by many asylum migrants to encourage dignified embodied encounters. In our improvisation workshops, where participants did not know each other from before, activities often included humorous, even absurd examples. An exercise called “I am a tree”, where we created group statues by adding ourselves bodily and discursively as new elements into the emerging “figure”, produced many humorous exchanges:

This time many of the participants wanted to start a new figure, to be the first one who stands in the middle and introduces a new topic. Humour is amply present, and in this exercise, it is easy and instant. It is situational and does not request much understanding, but instead unites the group and creates a sense of belonging as we are “in the same joke”. An example: I am a tree – I am an egg – I am a chicken – followed by other humorous extensions that made everyone laugh. (Notebook 1: 137–138.)

Here humorous acts eased the atmosphere in a space where people from different parts of the world, many in fragile life situations, were requested to throw themselves into imaginary embodied exercises. They were used to invite the approval of others, for interaction that required not only embodied proximity – which for male and female participants with diverse cultural backgrounds was an ask in itself – but empathic openness including tolerance of the discomfort brought forth by the “unsettling condition” in LaCapra’s terms. In this case, as in many others, a break was necessary before the next exercise. The coffee and biscuits available in the workshops allowed everyone to regain their voluntary-involuntary bodily composure in a socially unpressured situation.

Along with humour, other social gestures to invite dignifying encounters were presented by our participants. Going back to the tram case, the second important form of communication used there was Finnish language. This lies at the core of Reza’s life: he is determined to learn the language as quickly as possible because it will allow him to take his place in the Finnish society as himself. The language itself became a significant dignifying element in how he was recognised as a person – an aspiring Finn who dares to laugh at himself. What occurred in the tram was an instance of conviviality where “feelings of belonging or not belonging are inseparable from the experience of both being and feeling a citizen” (Kallio et al., 2020: 718).

Another example from our improvisation workshops shows how dignifying encounters can be encouraged by elements that help people overcome their linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and religious differences. In one of the sessions a participant had a young baby with her. While the child was obviously not actively participating in the activities, most of the participants made eye contact, smiled, and touched the baby, recognising the child’s undeniable humanity. Regardless of their background, gender, or age, people wanted to connect with the child. This shows how the baby’s bodily presence created an empathetic atmosphere to the workshop, which made it easier for everyone to express appreciation of each other’s basic humanity. This is a prime example of how elementary recognition depends on empathy (Brennan, 2021; Honneth, 2008; Jardine, 2015).

Thus far we have shown how asylum migrants can experience dignifying encounters with other people. Yet oftentimes they do not receive recognition in their everyday settings. The fear of misrecognition has taught refugees performative tactics by which they can seek to ensure dignifying encounters (Häkli et al., 2017). They may tell stories that they know will evoke empathy because they are recognisable to the listener, and/or because they externalise the threat and the undignified encounter far from the listener, thus avoiding empathetic unsettlement. Stories of journeys showing hardship and undignifying encounters, for example with the police and border guards, are often such. If the narrator locates these encounters outside Finland, the listener – the white Finnish ethnographer – can remain comfortably outside of the easily understandable story:

An Afghan woman I spoke to a couple of weeks ago tells me the story of her journey first from Afghanistan to Iran and onward to Turkey. The first attempt to leave Iran failed; they were captured at the border and taken to Afghanistan. Families had to pay to get them freed and returned to Iran. The second attempt brought her to Turkey and onward from there to Greece on a dinghy, from where she continued to Finland. While telling this story she speaks Finnish quickly and fluently. The story is emotional, but the coherent narrative structure and plot point to a rehearsed story. (Notebook 1: 26)

This excerpt offers another example of how asylum migrants can invite others to see them as who they are. Next, we turn to encounters across alterity where asylum migrants are unable to secure this basic human condition.

Undignifying encounters

Implicit expressions of misrecognised personhood

Devaluation of personhood can be deliberate or unintentional. Finland is no exception among countries where racism, Islamophobia, anti-immigration attitudes and right-wing populism have increased during the 2000s (Lizotte and Kallio, 2024). It was therefore not surprising to learn that some of our participants’ encountered overt hostility or covert prejudice from the locals, as the excerpt at the start of this paper shows. However, such experiences were typically implicit, which is interesting, given that in 2023, Finland was leading the statistics of EU countries on people experiencing racism (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2023). Our participants rarely referred to actual undignifying experiences with Finnish people, which stands in contrast to how they sometimes described encounters with other migrants:

The participant says that, in fact, Finnish people are not any more racist than any other people. On the other hand, some days ago while he was visiting [organisation], a Sudanese woman refused to sit next to him because he is gay. This hurt him more than any other experience of racism, and he left the situation crying. (Notebook 1: 43)

Implicit expressions of misrecognised personhood came through when we learned that many of the participants did not have Finnish friends. True empathetic encounters leading to connection with local people in the community seemed lacking. They also shared that while office workers may do their job without direct discrimination, they tend to smile kindly only at the customers they identify as Finns. Such hints of mundane situations of experienced otherness often came to our view through performative aspects in our participants’ narratives. We saw this emerge in workshops focusing on security, arranged as part of a Finnish language class.

The participants were asked to stand on a line on the floor according to how much they trust the police. An overwhelming majority indicated that they fully trusted the Finnish police, while showing more ambivalence or outright hostility towards the police in their countries of origin. While this is an indication of different experiences with the police, the embodied narratives were also likely influenced by the fear of appearing ungrateful when expressing dissatisfaction with the host society (Nayeri, 2019). A city employee with a refugee background pointed to other ambivalent dimensions in these relations:

Overall, the Finnish police has a good reputation and most of the foreigners trust them. But the problem is that […] when something happens and you need to report a crime, for example – when you go there on the spot there is no human contact. So, the Finnish police succeeds as an organization but the police employee there at the checkout or on the street, the society lacks competence and understanding. (Interview with Support worker 2)

The interviewee notes that while asylum migrants may express trust in the police in general, their personal interactions with police officers may still be distant or confusing. As the actions of an individual officer reflect the deep-seated latent racism of the wider society, the risk of misrecognition of personhood in embodied encounters is evident. Besides these implicit expressions, we pay attention to two subtle ways in which dignity can be violated. They often occur in hierarchical settings in which asylum migrants are weakly positioned, but also in other everyday encounters. Both can be analysed in terms of empathy.

Undignification through sympathetic performativity

In common parlance, empathy tends to be equated with sympathy. Yet as Smaling (2007) stresses, empathy has no normative basis. It functions as a basic dynamic between people who seek to relate to each other through understanding, without necessarily feeling with each other. In practice, the relationship between empathy and sympathetic expressions and enactments is complex. Although it may seem paradoxical, empathic understanding can be used instrumentally against a person (Campos-Delgado and Côté-Boucher, 2024; Fernandes, 2017), and sympathetic agency can be performed without genuine empathic, or caring, relatedness (Ponzanesi 2024).

These intentional or unintentional attitudes correspond to what Joachim Duyndam (2010: 8) calls “gruesome sham-empathy”, which occurs when empathy is substituted by sympathetic performativity and the recipient’s personhood is overlooked. Intuitively, it may be difficult to imagine sympathising beyond empathic relatedness – how could such agency not be based on empathy? The next excerpt from our fieldnotes is illuminating:

The teacher has told Riaz that their Finnish skills are so good that they could start vocational school already in January. (Ethnographer’s notes from participant’s description of encounters, Notebook 1: 118–119)

Riaz is a young refugee who attends evening school for adults. The program is designed for migrants who want to complete Finnish basic education and get a certificate that allows entering further studies. In a country like Finland, life without the certificate means very limited opportunities in the labour market. Most educational programs expect it, and education is highly valued in all areas of working life. The vocational program suggested by the teacher must be something very practical since Riaz cannot yet read or write Finnish.

At first it was difficult for us – as for Riaz – to understand the teacher’s motivation as the message seemed so clear: it would be better for an asylum seeker to get an education that will help getting a job quickly rather than an education that opens broader opportunities in the society. Why encourage Riaz, who has progressed faster than usual in spoken language, into a social position that has narrow prospects in the Finnish society?

The idea of sham-empathy helps understand the dynamics of this encounter. While apparently well-intentioned, the teacher refused to accept the challenge of seeing the situation emphatically in Riaz’s terms where future prospects matter. Leaning on a stereotypical idea of what is beneficial for Riaz, the teacher evaded the unsettling state that LaCapra (2014) talks about, including the risk that one’s world will be reshaped. Similar situations have been analysed in a decolonising spirit as “empathetic ‘failures’” (Pedwell, 2016: 47), “lazy empathy” (Tucker, 2016: 39) and “toxic empathy” (Ponzanesi, 2024: 38, following Nakamura). Marino (2022) describes such dynamism aptly: “sympathy as a vertical and detached relation to the other” (575) in distinction from “the epistemological and ethical position oriented by recognition” (577). Drawing from the classic work of Carl Rogers, Smaling (2007) notes that these ‘failures’ are commonplace because building empathic relationships across otherness require exposure to the embodied existence of the other: “It is not surprising that we shy away from true understanding. If I am truly open to the way life is experienced by another person – if I can take his world into mine – then I run the risk of seeing life in his way, of being changed myself, and we all resist change. So we tend to view this other person’s world only in our terms, not in his” (Rogers, 1967: 89, quoted in Smaling, 2007: 323).

Another example of seemingly sympathetic encounters comes from a participant who was regularly recognised as a “good migrant” by local people. The refugee-background support worker realised that what was being valued in these positive encounters was not the person, but the ability to learn languages and thus fit in:

I have had the privilege of learning the language really quickly… really well, and I have noticed that it has a huge effect here in Finnish society. People see me as smart, and that’s really wrong. I don’t like it, because it is really unfair towards those who are smart but don’t necessarily speak the language. (Interview with support worker 2)

The interviewee considered the appraisal of their proficiency in Finnish simultaneously dignifying and undignifying. Missing is the genuine understanding that Smaling, with Rogers, emphasises as crucial to empathic relations building. It is the Finnish-speaking asylum migrant who is highly valued here, which devalues the personhood of refugees “who are smart but don’t necessarily speak the language”. Hence the positive encounter comes at the price of other encounters, which gives it a colonial tone. The expressed disapproval is accentuated by the fact that the “sham” is usually not realised by the “pretend-empathiser” who may feel good about themself and the encounter: “the sham-empathizer runs away with the feelings of another and leaves the other alone” (Smaling, 2007: 321). While this may be completely understandable as part of the social life where we do not want to be constantly unsettled, it does not go unnoticed by the one whose personhood is thus misrecognised. Therefore, performative sympathy may end up violating a person’s dignity, in ways difficult to express to the violator or anyone else. Such devaluations are therefore difficult to challenge, which is a central theme in our final piece of analysis.

Undignification through instrumental use of empathy

Instrumental use of empathy as a violation of dignity is apparent in the case of Majed, a young Arab refugee who arrived in Finland in 2022. He has been severely bullied by other, mostly Arab students due to his openly male homosexual identity. As only one school in the municipality offers basic education to migrants over the age of 15, few options to avoid daily harassment exist. About a week before the following events, Majed sent us a video clip from the school to show his embodied resistance: In full makeup and with his long hair open, he wore a leopard-print top, tight black jeans, and an open silk kimono. The message was clear: misrecognition will only encourage me to manifest my identity more.

Five days later, one of the bullies attacked him physically at the bus stop on his way home. Majed reported the incident to the school and asked for help. This led to a meeting with the students, their teachers, and a social advisor from the city. At the meeting, the bully offered an alternative story: that Majed had looked at him badly and offered him sex, hence his attack on him. Majed burst into tears – an involuntary embodied response to a situation in which his dignity was deliberately and repeatedly violated. He later told us that he could not understand why the other student was treating him like this.

The violation of Majed’s dignity was done in an openly hostile manner. After the meeting, he called us and said that he was beginning to feel hopeless about his situation. The school’s institutional response was that, as an adult, Majed could report the incident to the police – there was nothing the school could do. After the meeting he received different advice and an offer of help from a teacher’s aide working in his class:

An Arabic-speaking teacher’s aide tells Majed that the police are no help. He says he knows the attacker’s family and promises that he will apologise next week and will not cause trouble again. (Ethnographer’s notes from participant’s description, Notebook 1: 118)

Here we come to how empathic understanding can be deliberately used against a person, what we call the instrumental use of empathy. Typically, this occurs in unequal power relationships, in this case between a young refugee student and an older refugee in an institutional position. The teacher’s aide worked in the school mainly in the role of a cultural mediator. Cultural mediation is about translating across differences, both linguistic and cultural, and is intended to facilitate the work of local teachers. His job was therefore entirely based on empathy. Although initiated with good intentions, cultural mediation can be used for various purposes – even against refugees, as in this case (cf. Spathopoulou et al., 2021).

The teacher’s aide, being Arabic-speaking himself, understood the conflict situation between the Arab male students better than the local teacher. His suggestion is made to Majed in opposition to the school’s suggestion to report the attack to the police. He justifies it by saying that, in their case, the police would not be working in anyone’s best interest. This reassurance was not difficult to make as many Finnish asylum migrants share bad experiences and mistrust of the police in their countries of origin, and their personal encounters with the police in Finland may have been (implicitly) undignifying. Yet for Majed it was concurrently obvious that the teacher’s aide was taking sides in the conflict, which to him appeared mainly as intra-ethnic homophobia. Majed had talked about this to us also in more general: “I thought that when I come to Finland, I can go around everywhere in dresses with make-up, to look fantastic. I can’t – the reason is other Arabs” (Notebook 1: 42–43). Particularly important in this case is that the teacher’s aide does not present himself as biased, but rather as a peacemaker who is on the side of the migrants in a society that does not understand what is happening in their lives. Therefore, he uses empathy against Majed, disguised as sympathetic help. In this way, he hinders Majed’s ability to defend himself and seek recognition for who he is: a young Arab homosexual male refugee in Finland. Campos-Delgado and Côté-Boucher (2024) call such empathic care-control tactics.

The teacher’s aide’s suggestion to resolve the matter quickly by negotiating between the families, with himself acting as a mediator, was biased in two ways. First, he knew well enough that Majed had done nothing more than openly express his homosexual identity in a Finnish school that, in principle, respects gender equality and prohibits any form of insult based on gender or sexual orientation. Second, having arrived in Finland as an unaccompanied minor, unlike the perpetrator, Majed has no family to support him here or to negotiate the conflict with the families of other students. Based on his culturally sensitive understanding of the situation – and the general mistrust of and ambivalence toward police officers, interpreters, and other authorities among Arab men – he was able to convince Majed that it was better not to seek justice.

The bullying at school could therefore continue as before. Since Majed has no other way to get the certificate he needs to continue his education, he goes to school every day to achieve this goal. What he told us after the events was: “From now on, I need to be two Majeds: one at school, who disguises himself, and the normal me after school.” In the ethnographer's notes, the quote is followed by her genuinely empathic response: “My heart breaks.” (Notebook 1: 119). This shows how remaining proximate in the transgressive presence of empathic ethnographic work may allow LaCapra’s (2014) “attentive secondary witness” of the pain of others (cf. Gökarıksel and Secor, 2020; Ramakrishnan and Stavinoha, 2024).

We read this as a prime example of how personhood can be devalued by means of instrumental empathy, and further, how human dignity can be harshly violated in power-laden relationships. Amir and Shoshana (2018: 485) describe events like this as a “unique pain experience”, which is fundamentally embodied in the Plessnerian meaning of personhood.

Conclusions

Dignifying embodied encounters are everyday occurrences that take place in our daily lives as social affirmations of our existence as ourselves: I am who I feel I am because other people recognise my personhood. Such empathic understanding can go almost unnoticed when one is typically encountered as a person. In contrast, when one’s personhood is regularly misrecognised and one’s dignity is constantly undervalued, the occasions of due recognition stand out and reveal the fundamental importance of empathic encounters for one’s well-being and self-esteem. In this paper we argue that empathic understanding often fails to happen in the lives of asylum migrants, which means that their dignity is regularly and sometimes painfully violated.

In the analysis, we turned to Jay Bernstein’s (2015) Plessner-inspired theorisation that conceptualises bodily experiences and encourages a nuanced understanding of dignity that transcends mere action, embracing both autonomy and shared vulnerability. He suggests that human vulnerability is based on a dynamism where we make voluntary embodied choices yet at the same time experience involuntary bodily functions, which foregrounds that dignity emerges from the delicate balance between voluntary embodied agency and experienced involuntary embodiment. Emphasising an empathic reading of this thought, following Honneth (2008), Jardine (2015) and Brennan (2021), in our analysis we elucidated the structural and interpersonal factors that contribute to asylum migrants dignifying and undignifying experiences that may emerge in any mundane or institutional situation where they encounter other people as embodied persons.

The paper presents findings from a narrative ethnography that included trying our various arts-based and embodied methods in “play space” (Nussbaum, 2012). With this approach we explored how embodied encounters are experienced by asylum migrants. To attain the firsthand experiences of our participants through attentive secondary witness that does not seek to take the other’s place but sets out to understand situations from their perspectives, we have worked in the spirit of dialogical-hermeneutical empathy (Smaling, 2007) and empathic unsettlement (LaCapra, 2014). Throughout the ethnographic work, we opened ourselves up to the experiential worlds that our participants have shared with us, in a decolonising manner where these experiences come to shape our own worlds (Marino, 2022; Pedwell, 2016; Tucker, 2016). This means constantly checking back to ensure our understanding matched that of the participants, reflecting on our outsider/helper positionality, and the effect of potential gratefulness on the power relations between the researcher and the participants (cf. Nayeri, 2019).

The analysis discusses both dignifying and undignifying encounters, showing how (mis)recognition of personhood in mundane situations is connected to the dynamism between agential voluntary and experienced involuntary embodiment. We have introduced tactics that asylum migrants use to invite empathetic, dignifying encounters with local people and other migrants – including performative elements – as responses to a situation in which people are regularly misrecognised. The different ways in which this happens have been analysed under three themes, including implicit expressions of misrecognised personhood, and undignification through sympathetic performativity and instrumental use of empathy. The results underline that asylum migrants’ personhood may be violated intentionally or unintentionally, both of which require critical attention in what Bernstein (2015: 308) calls “a decent society”. When empathy is used instrumentally, it may be difficult to see from the outside that a deliberate violation of human dignity has taken place. Yet, the situations in which the one performing sympathy is not even aware of their own wrongdoing may be similarly harmful.

In recent speeches and statements by various institutional actors of the European Commission, there have been authoritative calls for a more “human and humane approach” to migration. While we share this concern in principle and understand the urgency of pushing for significant changes at the level of European migration policy and governance (Häkli et al., 2024), we argue that it is at least as important to pay attention to the myriad everyday occasions in which migrants are (un)dignified. These occasions offer opportunities to explore the structural and interpersonal factors that condition encounters across alterity. In this paper, we have provided some conceptual tools for this exploration, with the potential to identify where received ideas and stereotypes stand in the way of recognising human dignity.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the Research Council of Finland for the funding of the research (POEMS 339833, HUMANE-CLIMATE 347374), and for the Space and Political Agency Research Group for insightful comments on the manuscript. We are also thankful for all participants in our research who have shared their experiences with us and taken part in our arts-based participatory activities. Finally, we are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of EPC for their encouraging comments on the manuscript.

ORCID iDs

Kirsi Pauliina Kallio

Jouni Häkli

Aura Lounasmaa

Ethical approval and informed consent

Informed consent and permission were requested for each instance, and the research was thoroughly evaluated by the Tampere University Ethics Committee.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Research Council of Finland for the funding of the research (POEMS 339833, HUMANE-CLIMATE 347374).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Kirsi Pauliina Kallio is a professor of environmental pedagogy and education at Tampere University where she hosts the Spatial Socialization and Environmental Citizenship Research Collective (SPECS). She has studied extensively the development and enactment of political agency, specifically subject formation, spatial and political socialization, and lived citizenship. Her present work focuses on climate mobilities, sustainable urban mobilities, asylum migration in the EU, and arts-based environmental education. Recent publications include: ‘Youth far-right politics in Finland as a form of lived citizenship’ (Space & Polity, with C. Lizotte), and ‘Trapped in (in)visibility: Contested intercorporeality in undocumented migrants’ lives’ (Geopolitics, with J. Häkli).

Jouni Häkli is a professor of regional studies and the leader of the Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG) at Tampere University. His research lies at the intersection of political geography and global and transnational sociology. His work focuses on the study of political subjectivity and agency, lived citizenship, forced migration, and borders and national identities. His recent publications include: ‘Devaluing personhood: The framing of migrants in the EU’s new pact on migration and asylum' (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, with G. Kudžmaitė and K.-P. Kallio), and 'Bodies and persons: The politics of embodied encounters in asylum seeking' (Progress in Human Geography, with K. P. Kallio).

Aura Lounasmaa is a post-doctoral researcher at the Space and Political Agency Research Group and vice chair of Narrare Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University in Finland. She is also co-director of the Association of Narrative Research and Practice. She specializes in narrative and creative research methods, with focus on forced migration and refugee education. Her recent publications include: ‘Narrative research: Research methods’ (Bloomsbury, co-authored), ‘Writing collaboratively in a lockdown: Building connections in online writing groups with refugees, migrants and local communities’ (Springer, co-authored), and ‘Biographical perspectives on lives lived during Covid-19: Global narratives and international methodological innovations’ (Springer).

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