Becoming a migrating heritage community: Heritage enactments, belonging and inclusion for refugees and asylum seekers

In this paper, we explore the concept of a migrant heritage community, with the aim of understanding how people who experienced forced displacement use heritage to renegotiate a sense of belonging and identity in their new environment. Through the ethnographic case study of a civil society organization that supports the wellbeing of refugees and asylum seekers in North East England, we investigate how a heritage community takes shape and how it promotes inclu- sion. This leads us to demonstrate that in this context, the heritage community emerges through a shared practice that promotes heri- tage enactment affordances. This enactment allows two information landscapes to coexist: one negotiated with the community and one inherited from individuals’ pasts. Thus, we argue that for people who have been uprooted from their homes and resettled in England, the process of inclusion is facilitated by the entanglement of these two landscapes, whereby they can take an active part in their environment while preserving their own ways of knowing and doing.