Lunch Hour Lecture | Destitution by design

About the lecture:

Destitution by design: immigration policy and the conditions of life making

In this lecture, Prof Rachel Rosen and Dr Eve Dickson report on the findings of their long-term research with impoverished migrant parents and their children who do not have access to mainstream welfare support in the UK. Rather than achieving its questionable policy aims, Rosen and Dickson show how the draconian ‘No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF)’ immigration policy enforces destitution and debt. NRPF affects everyone from citizen children to migrant parents with longstanding residency in the UK and undocumented families from Britain’s former colonies, now being expanded to an ever-widening group of people. Rosen and Dickson argue that the grinding effects of NRPF are designed to make life impossible – a process they call ‘welfare bordering’. Although NRPF’s effects long outlast the immigration status itself, families do their best to weather and make lives worth living – in the process offering insights into borders, anti-migrant rhetoric, social justice, and belonging.

UCL's popular public Lunch Hour Lecture series has been running at UCL since 1942, and showcases the exceptional research work being undertaken across UCL. Lectures are free and open to all and since 2020 have been held online.

About the speaker:

Rachel Rosen is a Professor of Sociology in the Social Research Institute at UCL. Her research focuses on child and family migration, forced displacement, racialised borders, and the neoliberal state. She is director of the Critical Childhood Studies Centre at UCL, co-author with Dickson of Bordering Social Reproduction Migrant Mothers and Children Making Lives in the Shadows (2025, MUP), and co-editor of Crisis for whom? Critical global perspectives on childhood, care, and migration (2023, UCL Press).

Eve Dickson is a Senior Research Fellow in the Social Research Institute at UCL. Her research focuses on social inequality, migration, childhood, and subjectivity. 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)'.

About the chair:

Ann Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial Studies in the Thomas Coram Research Unit at UCL. Her research focuses on the ways in which psychological experiences and social processes are linked and intersectional. It explores racialised and gendered identities, mixed-parentage, motherhood, migration and transnational families. Professor Phoenix is widely published, and her latest books include Environment in the Lives of Children and Families: Perspectives from India and the UK and Nuancing Young Masculinities: Helsinki boys’ intersectional relationships in new times.