ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that refugee voices can be expressed only in certain prescribed ways through creative media even when the ways in which these voices are expressed are symbolically fluid. The data draws on fieldwork with refugee groups in a range of cities across the United Kingdom. This fieldwork includes many different kinds of creative mediation, including fantasy creative writing, audio reflection, collage, letter writing, technical writing, and collective and group storytelling, by refugees originally from countries including Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Syria and Senegal. The chapter describes how despite the inventive processes through which such voices were given a platform, only refugee voices that reproduce or work within the logics of neoliberal systems are expressed; these are the same systems that stereotype refugees at a larger scale in other contexts.
