Mothering Across Borders: Ayahs, Migration, and Racialised Care

Borderlines is thrilled to host Mothering Across Borders: Ayahs, Migration, and Racialised Care.

Panel Description

This panel explores how migrant women’s motherhood has been shaped, represented, and regulated across different historical and political contexts, from colonial ayahs employed in British imperial households to Turkish and Kurdish migrant mothers in contemporary London. Bringing these two contexts into dialogue reveals enduring patterns of racialised care work, maternal surveillance, and moral judgement imposed on minoritised women.
The discussion will examine how ayahs were positioned as both essential and expendable within colonial family life, and how migrant mothers today are similarly scrutinised through welfare, education, and immigration regimes. At the same time, the panel highlights women’s everyday strategies of resistance, care, and survival, including transnational mothering, the creation of collective women’s spaces and child-rearing networks, the establishment of nurseries, and advocacy within racialised institutions. By tracing these connected histories, the panel invites reflection on how empire, migration, race, and gender continue to shape whose motherhood is valued, suspected, or celebrated in Britain today.

Date: 26 February 2026
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Format: Online via MS Teams; Meeting ID: 341 551 843 259 62, Passcode: wF95BA6t
You can save the link directly or register via Eventbrite so we can send you joining details and reminders before the session.

Speakers

Dr. Feride Kumbasar

Dr Feride Kumbasar is a Borderlines Resident Fellow, feminist migration scholar and community researcher whose work bridges academia, activism, and creative practice. She completed her TECHNE- and AHRC funded PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Roehampton (2024), titled Migrant Women Negotiating Border, Work, and Space: Turkish and Kurdish Women in Hackney, 1980–2018. Her research investigates the intersections of migration, gender, labour, and urban change, using participatory and decolonial methodologies such as oral history, go[1]along interviews, and community mapping.

Feride’s forthcoming monograph, under provisional acceptance for Manchester University Press’s Women on the Move series, develops this research further to examine counter cartographies of migrant women’s agency. Alongside her academic work, she has held leadership roles in women’s and refugee organisations and curated the exhibition Hidden Voices: The Making of Hackney (2022). Her work foregrounds collaborative knowledge production and feminist approaches to belonging, care, and spatial justice.

Diana Caine

Diana Caine is a former consultant neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst whose earlier research used psychoanalytic theory to rethink the implications of neurological damage for human subjectivity. Her current work turns this lens toward coloniality, focusing on settler-colonial infants and the women, enslaved or indentured, who cared for them.

Her article “Apartheid’s Paradox: Impossible Borders, Unspeakable Intimacies” appeared in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2023). A version of this work will appear in her forthcoming book, Mothering in the Colonies (Routledge, 2026).