Since coming to power in 2010, the UK Coalition government has enacted a series of cuts to public spending, under the auspices of austerity. Underpinning these cuts is a neo-liberal model of citizenship, in which citizens are expected to be autonomous, independent and economically productive, and in which the responsibilities of citizenship outweigh the rights. This model of citizenship is characterised by a paradoxical approach to social reproduction. The Coalition government has taken a significant interest in social reproduction as a means of creating the next generation of ‘good’ neo-liberal citizens; yet, the current austerity measures involve the withdrawal of state support for social reproduction activities. Drawing on participant observation carried out with migrant women's groups in Sheffield and Manchester, as well as interviews with group members, this article demonstrates how the government's paradoxical approach to social reproduction, combined with gendered and racialised discourses of citizenship and ‘Britishness’, have led to policies that place ethnic minority migrant women in an untenable situation. The social reproduction activities of ethnic minority migrant women are the subject of intense government interest, because of the concern that they will be unable to produce ‘good’ neo-liberal citizens. In some cases, this has led to government policies clearly intended to dissuade ‘undesirable’ migrants from having children. In other cases, migrant women are expected to show their commitment to integration, both for themselves and their children, specifically by learning English, even as the government has drastically cut funding for English as a Second or Other Language (ESOL) classes. While seemingly paradoxical, this is in keeping with a racialised neo-liberal model of citizenship under which the ‘responsible’ migrant mother should be able to parent and learn English without government assistance. Nonetheless, these policies are actually self-defeating, as they prevent migrant women from exhibiting the very characteristics of neo-liberal citizenship that they are ostensibly trying to encourage.
This article explores the construction of the UK National Health Service as a ‘bordering scape’, and the depiction of pregnant migrants as an especial problem, in policy documents and Parliamentary debates around the 2014 Immigration Act. Migrant women’s reproductive practices have long been an object of state anxiety, and a target of state intervention. However, this has been largely overlooked in recent scholarship on the proliferation and multiplication of internal bordering processes. This article addresses this gap and contributes to conceptualisations of bordering processes as situated and intersectional, arguing that discourses and anxieties around the reproduction of the nation-state play an important role in informing the construction of the proliferating internal border. These discourses and anxieties, which are heavily gendered and racialised, interact with the specificities of individual bordering sites in shaping both bordering processes, and the production of different individuals and groups within these processes.
This article examines the intersection of religious faith and the ‘fight against modern slavery’ in the UK, as yet unexplored in sociological literature. Analysis of faith-based organisations’ activities in this area challenges understandings of a postsecular rapprochement between faith and secular actors – where postsecular is used by some scholars to refer to the re-emergence of faith in the public sphere, and where we understand rapprochement to mean the placing of equal value on faith-based and secular worldviews. Our research reveals that faith-based organisations in the anti-trafficking/modern slavery third sector operate on a ‘dual register’, secularising as they professionalise their public face, while retaining religious distinctiveness when engaging with co-religionists. We argue that, rather than evidence of a genuine two-way postsecular rapprochement, it seems that faith-based organisations in this sector are prioritising secular modalities, meaning the learning process is one-sided rather than complementary.
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