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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.
> 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.
> 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.
>
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.
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
