"Unvetted Single Males:" Humanizing Three African Men Who Sought Asylum in Ireland

In this article we analyse narratives of the lived experiences of three African male asylum seekers in Ireland. We examine how socio-political crises in their home countries created individual ruptures in their lives, leading them to seek refuge abroad. Two of the participants' attempts to soothe these transformative ruptures and experiences of past violence are articulated in a radically positive engagement with the precarious and uncertain reality of asylum seeking and the strongly negative societal discourse surrounding refugees. Their imagined hopeful futures for themselves in a new homeland contribute to a theorization of the power of imagination in producing utopias. The third case orientates around Victor, who was denied asylum and died by suicide. Although Victor was not a participant in our research in a traditional sense, his death permeated the lived experiences of other asylum seekers, both literally and symbolically. Victor is an encapsulation of the dystopic outcome of fleeing. By highlighting the intensively human experiences of these asylum seekers, we aim to humanize narratives surrounding global immigration, refugee status, and to problematize the derogatory discourse in Ireland surrounding "unvetted single males."