Book launch: Bordering Social Reproduction: Migrant mothers and children making lives in the shadows

Rachel Rosen and Eve Dickson introduce their new book Bordering Social Reproduction in conversation with Gargi Bhattacharyya and Shirin Rai.

The book 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.

This event will be particularly useful for researchers, students, community organisers, and policymakers.

Related links

• TCRU seminar series
• Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU)
• Social Science Research Unit
• Social Research Institute

Image

EKKAPON via Adobe Stock.