Bordering/mothering online book launch

EVENT POSTPONED FROM 5 JUNE TO 9 OCTOBER

In this event, we will celebrate two new books by SSAHE members: Bordering social reproduction: Migrant mothers and children making lives in the shadows by Rachel Rosen and Eve Dickson, published by Manchester University Press in April 2025, and Borders, Citizenship, and Pregnancy: Migrant Women’s Experiences of Pregnancy and Maternity Care in the UK by Gwyneth Lonergan, published by Policy Press in June.

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.

Using the analytical framework of reproductive justice, Borders, Citizenship, and Pregnancy examines migrant women’s experiences of pregnancy and maternity care within the broader context of gendered and racialised discourses and policies around health, reproduction and citizenship, austerity and an expanding border regime. Based on interviews and focus groups with migrant mothers, third sector workers and NHS staff, it explores how immigration policies impact reproductive practices and unevenly distribute access to essential resources and support. The book provides valuable insights into the underlying social causes behind migrant women’s relatively poor maternal outcomes and contributes significantly to scholarship on the intersections of citizenship, reproduction and expanding border controls.

In this webinar, Gwyneth Lonergan, Rachel Rosen and Eve Dickson will introduce their books, followed by a response by Umut Erel, and Q&A with the audience.

Speakers:

Gwyneth Lonergan is Lecturer in Social Sciences at Northumbria University. Previously, she was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Social Science and Bioethics in the department of Sociology at Lancaster University. Between 2017 and 2019 she was a Research Associate in Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. She was awarded her PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester in 2016. Her recent publications include "Pregnant racialised migrants and the ubiquitous border: the hostile environment as a technology of stratified reproduction" in Critical Social Policy, "Reproduction and the Expanding Border: Pregnant Migrants as a ‘Problem’ in the 2014 Immigration Act" in Sociology, "Distinctive or Professionalised? Understanding the Postsecular in Faith-Based Responses to Trafficking, Forced Labour and Slavery in the UK" (with H Lewis et al) in Sociology.

Rachel Rosen is a Professor of Sociology at University College London. Rachel's research focuses on marginalised children and families, especially those with precarious immigration status; the intersection of neoliberal welfare and border regimes which shape their lives; and their practices of sustenance, care, social reproduction, and solidarity. Her research, teaching, and public engagement is located at the intersections of sociology of childhood and materialist feminist thought. Her recent publications include "From waithood to alternative futures: unaccompanied children and young people's temporalities of care in the UK's migration regime" in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, "Childhood and Care in the Time of Coronavirus" in Coronavirus: Perspectives on Childhood, Youth and Family, and "The formative intersections of ‘race’, nation, and generation: learning from ‘care’ in the lives of unaccompanied child migrants" (with V Metoo) in American Behavioral Scientist.

Eve Dickson is a Research Fellow in the Social Research Institute at UCL. She works across cultural, psychosocial, and childhood studies. Her current research is concerned with the relationship between immigration and welfare controls, with a focus on families and children. She is co-investigator on the ESRC-funded project, ‘Social reproduction in the shadows: Making lives with no recourse to public funds’.

Umut Erel is Professor in Sociology at the Open University. Her research employs an intersectional approach and explores how gender, migration and ethnicity inform practices of citizenship. This has first been developed in her PhD, looking at skilled migrant women from Turkey in Britain and Germany (2009), then she explored these issues in the context of paid and unpaid work of refugee women in the voluntary sector and migrants in new areas of multiculture. Her current work focuses on migrant families and citizenship, exploring how migrant women’s mothering practices can be conceptualized as citizenship practices.

Chair: Nando Sigona, Chair of International Migration and Forced Displacement and Director of IRiS, University of Birmingham.