Bordering Social Reproduction - (Women on the Move) by Rachel Rosen & Eve Dickson (Hardcover)

About the Book

Bordering social reproduction explores how migrants subjected to policies that seek to deny them the means of life endeavour to make and sustain meaningful lives. It develops innovative theorisations of welfare bordering and advances the novel concept of weathering to comprehend mother's and children's life-making practices under duress.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

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.

Review Quotes

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 London

Racialized 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 University

A 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 Center

In 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 Relations

Based 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 Education

Bordering 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 Beach

Drawing 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

About the Author

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