Bordering Social Reproduction: Migrant Mothers and Children Making Lives in the Shadows - Hardcover

by Rachel Rosen (Author), Eve Dickson (Author)

Bordering social reproduction explores what happens when migrants subject to policies that seek to deny them the means of life nonetheless endeavour to make and sustain meaningful lives. Developing innovative theorisations of welfare bordering, the volume provides rich ethnographic insights into the everyday lives of destitute mothers and children who are denied mainstream welfare support in the United Kingdom due to their immigration status. This book shows how enforced destitution and debt work alongside detention and deportation as part of a tripartite of exclusionary technologies of the racial state. It advances the novel concept of weathering to comprehend mother's and children's life-making practices under duress - arguing that these are neither acts of heroic resilience nor solely symptomatic of lives rendered disposable, but indications of the fragilities of repressive migration regimes and, on occasion, refusals to accept their terms of existence.

Back Jacket

An urgent, painful, insightful read, this book is destined to become a key work in understanding how and why the ill-treatment of children remains so central to UK state racism.
Gargi Bhattacharyya, Professor and Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, UCL

If borders are deployed by states to shape lives, this book shows us how migrants continue to make lives by enrolling optimism, strength and refusals.
Tithi Bhattacharya, Associate Professor of South Asian History, Purdue University

This compelling examination of the brutality of NRPF sensitively documents families' capacities to prevail, creating and maintaining meaningful lives in the shadows of deep hardship.
Cindi Katz, Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, CUNY Graduate Center

Bordering social reproduction provides rich ethnographic insights into the complexities of the everyday lives of migrant mothers and children who are subject to the United Kingdom's 'no recourse to public funds' (NRPF) policy, a controversial immigration condition prohibiting access to most welfare benefits for even the most destitute.

Developing innovative theorisations of welfare bordering, this book shows how enforced destitution and debt work alongside detention and deportation as exclusionary technologies of the racial state. Bordering social reproduction advances the novel concept of weathering to understand mothers' and children's life-making practices under duress: neither acts of heroic resilience nor solely symptomatic of lives rendered disposable, but indications of the fragility of repressive migration regimes and, on occasion, the refusal to accept their terms of existence.

Making incisive interventions into theoretical discussions around social reproduction, bordering and childhood, this engaging book invites us to think carefully about the relationship between welfare states and border regimes, and how we might contest them.

Author Biography

Rachel Rosen is a Professor of Sociology at University College London
Eve Dickson is a Senior Research Fellow at University College London