When deportation and detention are unavailable to racialised border regimes, what violent technologies of power do they deploy to eject those they do not want? What happens when migrants subject to policies that seek to deny them the means of life nonetheless endeavour to make and sustain meaningful lives? What are the implications for no borders activism?
In their co-authored book Bordering Social Reproduction, former ISRF Fellow Rachel Rosen and Eve Dickson argue that while welfare bordering may operate quietly in the shadows, it is nonetheless a form of punitive exclusion from the means of life and central to the (re)production of the racialised nation state. It enforces immiseration and debt across generations, rendering the labour of everyday life grinding and relentless.
Drawing on rich ethnographic insights and close engagement with destitute mothers and children who are denied mainstream welfare support in the United Kingdom due to their immigration status, Rosen and Dickson argue for the importance of understanding lives beyond notions of surplus or abandonment. They advance the concept of weathering as an analytic to apprehend and valorise people’s efforts to make and sustain meaningful lives – without losing sight of the violence of a border regime designed to make it impossible.
Bordering Social Reproduction advances contemporary debates about social reproduction, childhood, and racial capitalism while offering important insights about the fragilities of repressive border regimes and therefore the possibilities for their dismantling.
Rachel Rosen is Professor of Sociology at University College London. She was an ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2023-24, for her project Welfare Transformations and Children’s Reproductive Labour: Advancing Social Reproduction Theory Through Interdisciplinary Dialogue.
Eve Dickson is Senior Research Fellow at University College London. She is currently co-leading an ESRC-funded research project with Rachel Rosen entitled 'Social reproduction in the shadows: Making lives with 'no recourse to public funds' (NRPF)' (2023-2026).
Rachel and Eve will be joined by Gargi Bhattacharyya, Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre at UCL's Institute of Advanced Studies; and Shirin Rai, Professor of Politics and International Relations at SOAS University of London.
