Bordering Social Reproduction

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

This is an urgent, painful, insightful read. It will uncover things that many of us half-know, laying open the ugly processes necessary to render some people, some families, some children as ‘deserving’ no more than wilful immiseration. This 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, Director of Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, Institute of Advanced Studies, University College LondonRacialized people in general, and migrants in particular, are forced to make their lives through the external borders between nations and the internal borders that the nation state produces to deny access to lifemaking resources such as healthcare, employment and housing. The first border is ordered with guns, the second through welfare laws. Employing social reproduction theory with stunning analytical insight Rachel Rosen and Eve Dickson establish the relationship between these two borders. The mothers and children that the authors protagonize in this story, however, are no victims, they build their lives through and despite these violent technologies. 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 and the Director of Global Studies, Purdue UniversityA compelling examination of the brutality of NRPF (No Recourse to Public Funds), the bluntly named UK immigration policy, counterpoised with the determined practices of social reproduction that resist, refuse, and remake its consequences. The authors sensitively document families’ capacities to prevail, creating and maintaining meaningful lives in the shadows of deep hardship.Cindi Katz, Professor, City University of New York Graduate CenterIn this vital and illuminating book, the authors analyse the political economy of ‘welfare bordering’ through the No Recourse to Public Funds rule, showing its centrality to the continual remaking of racial capitalism, marking out migrants as racialised outsiders. Woven into this is the lived experiences of mothers and children on whom the rule imposes the slow, grinding violence of destitution, their efforts to fight its corrosive effects and to make their lives liveable. A rich, enlightening study of a hitherto obscure area of migration policy, which points the way to a politics of solidarity.Frances Webber, Institute of Race RelationsBased on longitudinal research, this scholarly and passionate book vividly highlights one of the key disgraces of our time – how migrant women and their children are rendered abject and neglected, prevented from receiving even basic daily life supports – yet through the analysis of ‘weathering’ practices they manage to show the dignity of survival as well as the damage caused by privation and exclusion. A key intervention within and between migration, feminist and childhood studies, this accessible and compelling account draws attention to the key underexamined intersections between women and children, as also with structures of racialisation, within current draconian immigration control regimes.Erica Burman, Sarah Fielden Professor of Education, Manchester Institute of EducationBordering Social Reproduction offers a profound and necessary intervention into the complex dynamics of social reproduction in an era of neoliberal austerity, racialized borders, and precarious migration. With sharp intellectual rigor, Rosen and Dickson challenge us to look beyond crisis narratives, offering instead a powerful and deeply human account of how migrant families navigate the everyday violence of welfare bordering.Lauren Heidbrink, Professor of Human Development, California State University Long BeachDrawing on meticulous ethnographic research, this book offers a vital contribution to our understanding of the everyday vulnerabilities created by welfare bordering. In doing so it delivers a compelling case for change.Katie Tonkiss, Senior Lecturer, Aston University

• Introduction Bordering social reproduction1 Enforcing destitution and debt2 Weathering through social reproduction3 Existential erasure and its discontents4 Childhood in the shadows5 Secrets and silences6 Doing time7 (En)countering ‘race’Conclusion Contesting welfare bordering