In this first episode of the new Between Borders season, host Olivia Sheringham (Birkbeck, University of London) speaks to Megan Crossley (Lancaster University) and Rebekka Hölzle (Birkbeck, University of London) about why care has become such an important theme in migration research and solidarity work. Together we unpack what care means, and why it matters, in the context of increasingly hostile and violent border regimes in the UK and beyond.

We trace the term "hostile environment" back to its origins in UK immigration policy and consider how care persists within, and pushes back against, systems designed to dehumanise, exclude and harm migrants. We discuss key concepts and thinkers shaping this field to consider why care is neither innocent nor straightforwardly benevolent, how it is entangled in continuing power dynamics and even complicit in colonial and oppressive histories. Sharing examples of our own research, we explore how a critical, situated approach to care offers a way to move beyond simplistic narratives of victimhood or resilience.

Mentioned resources:

• Home-city Spaces of Care Project (Birkbeck, University of London)
• Hobart H J K & Kneese T (2020) Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times. Social Text 38 (1 (142)): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7971067
• Raghuram P (2016) Locating Care Ethics Beyond the Global North. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 15(3): 511–533. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v15i3.1353
• Thompson J (2022) Care Aesthetics: For artful care and careful art. London: Routledge
• Tronto J C (1998) An Ethic of Care. Generations: Journal of the American Society on Aging. (Themed Issue: Ethics and Aging: Bringing the Issues Home) 22 (3): 15-20.

Further suggested resources:

• Clark-Kazak, C. (2023). ‘“Why Care Now” in Forced Migration Research?,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 22(4): 1151–1173. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v22i4.2210
• Crossley, M. (2026). Careless Bordering: Photovoice accounts from refugees and people seeking asylum in Northwest England. [Doctoral Thesis, Lancaster University]. Lancaster University. https://doi.org/10.17635/lancaster/thesis/3238 (Please note: This thesis is currently unavailable online however contact [email protected] to receive a copy)
• Crossley, M. (forthcoming). Careless Bordering: Care as a technology of control in UK asylum governanceMartin, A, Myers, N. & Viseu, A. (2015). The Politics of Care in Technoscience, Social Studies of Science 45(5): 625–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715602073
• Pirate Care a Syllabus Blog
• Puig de La Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, University of Minnesota Press.
• Sheringham, O. (2025). Creating cities of care: Towards a new radical care framework for geographical research with urban migrants and refugees. Progress in Human Geography, 49(3), 266-285. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325251327718

Active listening questions:

• Why has care become such an important concept within migration research and what can it offer to the field?
• What have been some of the main critiques of ‘care ethics’?
• Why do some scholars use the notion of ‘radical care’ and what does it imply?
• In what ways have scholars thought about the aesthetic dimensions of care? How might this be useful for thinking about the relationships between care, migration, and creativity?

Hello and welcome to a new series of Between Borders.

We're a collective of researchers who work on different topics relating to precarious migration.

We reflect on how people working or doing research in this area can better support people who are moving or who have moved across borders.

I'm Olivia Sheringham, senior lecturer in geography here at Birkbeck University.

And today I'll be talking to Rebekka Hölzle.

Hello.

And Megan Crossley.

Hi.

This season, we turn the focus to the theme of care, which has become a central theme in migration research and solidarity work, not least during and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To a large extent, this widespread interest in care has emerged in response to the increasingly uncaring and violent reality of border regimes in the UK and across the world today.

Through a series of episodes, we seek to unpack care through the lens of migration and explore different ways of understanding care and why this matters for a more just world.

This first episode introduces academic work and concepts, and the following episode will look in more depth at how they're applied in practice.

including thinking about ideas of care in relation to research ethics and methods.

Throughout this episode, we're going to refer to certain authors or resources which are shared in the show notes, including a reading list and some questions for reflection.

So to start with some unpacking of this term, Rebekka, could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your own research and how it links to the theme of care?

Yes, thank you so much.

I'm really excited to speak to you both today.

So my current research and also I used to work as a community organizer in London and basically I've been focusing on especially women's experiences and how migrant women navigate destitution and exclusion from welfare support in the UK.

And care really has always been at the heart of my activist practice and working alongside migrant communities.

As a feminist anarchist, I really believe in the power of prefigurative politics

That is, if we want to change the world, so to say, I really think we must begin in the here and now in our everyday relations and practices in how we organize and care for each other and also the spaces that we're in.

So I always like to imagine that if the aim of the British state is to create a hostile environment for immigration, then maybe one way of resisting and refusing this hostility and all these divisions might be to actually collectively create caring environments

in our neighborhoods and communities and also in our different work and research contexts.

So in my research I look at how this might play out in practice and how we can nurture this sort of situated and contextual care and solidarity also across like different positionalities and power hierarchies and conflicts that we will always continue to face in some ways.

And I think for me that's really where the power but also the tensions of care lies as a potentially radical practice.

Thanks, Rebekka.

Before we go on, you mentioned the hostile environment of the British state.

And I wondered if you could explain to our listeners how this emerged and how this term is used.

Yes, so the term was first introduced by New Labour in 2007, but most commonly it's traced back to a quote by the Conservative Home Secretary, Theresa May, in 2012.

who said that the new Immigration Act at the time was to create a really hostile environment for so-called illegal migrants.

And we all know that hostile environments have existed in the UK before that, like basically for migrants who are deemed undeserving and not to belong in the UK along the lines of race, class and gender.

But I think not least since then, like in the last 15 years or so, the hostile environment

has become a kind of umbrella term for a range of punitive and really hostile policies.

So for example, longer, more expensive and exclusive routes to settlement, exclusion for some migrants from welfare and health services, and just increasing everyday bordering controls and deportation as well.

Thanks, Rebekka.

There's so much to unpack there.

And I suppose what you were saying before invites us to think about how care persists in the context of this very hostile or uncaring environment.

But also that through this persistence, it resists or refuses to be defined only by these terms, by this hostility.

Megan, what about you?

Can you tell us a bit about your own research and how it relates to today's theme?

Absolutely.

Thanks, Olivia.

And thank you, Rebekka, as well.

I think that my research looks at where care and bordering regimes meet and I'm really interested in the ways that people care for one another as well as the ways that the state through its immigration legislation and its welfare systems withholds care from migrant communities.

So in my recent research I focus on the everyday lives of people who are seeking asylum in the UK, looking at how policies and systems create conditions of legal and economic precarity or what I would think of as careless conditions.

And I'm especially interested in how people still make their lives liveable within these constraints, often through very informal or more relational care practices.

So I suppose in relation to today's theme, I'm thinking about care as something that's constrained and even co-opted by migration and border regimes, but also really thinking about that tension between care as a form of positive and even radical connection, as well as care as a form of control.

I think that's really at the heart of my work.

Thanks, Megan.

Yeah, care has also been a central theme in my research in different ways.

And most recently, and most explicitly in a way, this has been a creative project with a group of refugees and people seeking asylum in London.

And this was in collaboration with refugee theatre company Phosphorus Theatre and the Walthamstow-based charity Stories and Supper.

And it's involved creative workshops and a weekend away in the countryside.

And doing these various different creative activities, we explored care and the absence of care in context shaped by austerity, the cutback of public services,

and everyday bordering or careless systems as you talked about, Megan.

And the creative approach in my work has also been about creating what you referred to, Rebekka, as these caring environments, so in contrast to the hostile environment of the British state.

And this also meant not having fixed ideas about the shape of the project and its outputs, but taking a step back and being open to what might emerge.

So Megan, turning again to you, why do you think care is so important and especially so in relation to migration?

So why care and why now?

I think care is such an important topic right now because these highly politicised migration contexts really seem to operate through what we might think about as a total absence of care.

As Rebekka mentioned, we see this all the time in the systematic exclusion of migrants from welfare provision and in policies that make life increasingly

but also in the often really visible, violent and dangerous ways in which borders can harm and even kill the people trying to cross them.

So in my research I argue that the state cares too little for migrants in this way, but also that the state cares too much in some ways that hurt and divide people.

I mean how often do we see these outrageous news headlines or politicians telling us that we should care about immigration and more explicitly we should be against it?

Yeah, that's so true, almost this idea that we should care about stopping immigration if we care about our country type narrative.

I wonder if you could say a bit more about this and perhaps this distinction between the idea that the state does seem to care about migrants and often in harmful ways, but not for migrants.

Yeah, so when the state does offer care to migrants through its welfare systems or certain policies,

The support that is offered is usually deliberately less than would be given to equal citizens as a kind of deterrent strategy to stop people moving here in a way.

But it can also be an increased form of surveillance or it can restrict people's ability to care for themselves.

For example, denying some migrants the right to work while simultaneously not providing very much money to live on and so building in a kind of dependency on the care of the state which it then doesn't want to provide.

And in my work, I use this concept of careless bordering to draw attention to these ways that care is selectively distributed based on immigration status.

And I'm thinking about how asylum and migration policies co-opt the care that they are obligated to provide for people as another way to control them in the state's best interests.

And I think we'll probably talk more about this later in the season, but what's important to note here is that these questions of care are also ultimately questions of value, questions of whose lives are considered worthy of care in the first place, who's able to give and receive care, and at the same time that care can be a site of political struggle and possibility as people continually practice care that challenge these exclusions.

Thanks, Megan.

Yeah, that's so important and so interesting.

So this idea that care is not inherently benevolent, even though it's often thought of as so.

we often think about care in these kind of positive terms.

And yet there's lots of recent scholarship, including yours, that reminds us that care has been complicit in oppressive systems that produce harm.

And you've highlighted this in relation to the contemporary border regime and this relationship between care and control and also in relation to welfare.

But we can also trace this back to how narratives of care were used to justify colonialism, dispossession and enslavement, and how these logics endure in discourses of humanitarianism, as well as bordering.

And as you say, Megan, the language of care is so prevalent, but care for whom and by whom, and what does care actually mean?

And Rebekka, what about you?

Why do you think care has become such an important lens in the context of contemporary migration debates?

Yes, I think the violence or I really like your term, Megan, of this carelessness of the border and welfare regime seems to be getting ever worse, like everywhere we look and kind of making life almost impossible.

But then I think that this emphasis must be on almost impossible because people also continue to survive and to refuse.

and to resist these hostile systems.

And I think that everyday care or reproductive labor is really key to this resistance and creating alternative networks of solidarity.

And I think for me, like doing research in a context like this of like researching situations of extreme hardship and destitution, there sometimes can be a bit of a tendency of scholarship to either represent the people that you're working with as kind of passive victims

So like over focusing on their oppression and subjection or the other the other side, like romanticizing their resilience and strength.

And for me, I think that care can be a really useful concept to actually think beyond these binaries of like victim versus hero, because care actually always brings us back to situated and really contextual analysis, the specific context, the relations and the specific interactions.

And I think if we, if we think about our own experiences and conversations with people like that really makes sense, like people might resist in one moment.

And that includes actually sometimes really surprising contexts or relations that we might not usually associate with resistance or care or activism.

And then in other moments, they might actually themselves reproduce structures or relations of control or uncare or carelessness, so to say.

Yeah, I agree with that, Rebekka.

I think care is such a broad term, which can make it problematic, as we've all said, but it also allows us to capture some of those contradictions and those nuances.

So this idea that care and control or care and uncare can be simultaneous.

So really, we can't think about care without taking into account the wider power relations within which and outside of which it emerges.

And as you said, Rebekka, care is always situated and contextual.

So we'll pick up on this theme of care as resistance in future episodes.

But for now, let's stay with the term and try to unpack it a bit more, and certainly within some scholarship.

One of the most widely cited definitions is from Joan Tronto and Baroness Fisher, who in a chapter that they published in 1993, described care as

A species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible.

And this definition has been taken up and reinterpreted by many different scholars since then, highlighting firstly this idea that care is a relational practice, so something that we do to maintain and sustain, how it has a certain universal quality to it.

So they call it a species activity, so this idea that's essential to all life,

We all need care and we're cared for at different moments in our lives, even though it continues to be devalued, as we've said.

And thirdly, how it has a certain moral or ethical judgment attached to it.

And this phrasing that they use as well as possible.

So living in this world as well as possible.

And they argue in the paper, and Tronto develops this in her later work on feminist care ethics,

that what good care means has to be negotiated relationally between the carer and cared for.

And they highlight these values of attentiveness, responsibility and responsiveness.

But although this definition continues to be cited a lot, it's also been quite widely critiqued.

And Rebekka, I wonder if you could comment a bit about some of these critiques or reinterpretations of this definition.

Yes, so one area I think in which this body of work of feminist care ethics based on Joan Tronto has been developed further has been to include more decolonial and also posthumanist feminist perspectives.

So as you just read in this definition, Tronto and Fisher called caring a species activity.

And I think if we think about this category of the human species, it's actually quite a troubled one.

So being quite critical and cautious about who actually gets included or excluded from these more universal human or humanity-centered perspectives.

So for example, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa writes about care in more imaginative and speculative ways, arguing basically how care is grounded in our interdependence not only with other humans,

but also our environments and what she calls more than human life on Earth.

And I think that's really relevant in times of human-made climate disasters.

And then another critique of Tronto's earlier work has been around a certain unidirectional understanding of care.

So basically, one person cares for another who then responds to that care.

And then Tronto herself actually later added the category, so not caring for but caring with,

to include care or understand care as something that flows more in both directions.

And I think that's really helpful, particularly also in the migration context, where I think we really need to think critically of more sort of top-down humanitarian intervention and explore more reciprocal ways of collaborating, so caring with migrants rather than caring for them.

Thanks, Rebekka.

That's really interesting.

And that kind of goes back to your idea of how care can disrupt these binaries between this kind of victim hero.

So Megan, what about you?

Whose work or what framework do you find insightful?

So there's so much amazing and interesting work on care across disciplines really that I find useful to draw from.

But I suppose one definition that I return to a lot comes from Hi'ilei Hobart and Tamara Kneese who describe radical care as a set of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds.

And I find that framing really resonates with my research because

It foregrounds care as something that people actively do to support themselves and each other in difficult circumstances, but also as something underappreciated and easily overlooked.

And it helps me think about care not just as an ethical ideal, but also as something practical and vital in response to precarity, especially in context shaped by border violence and hostility towards migration.

Yeah, thanks, Megan.

I've used that definition in my work too.

And I find it useful as it speaks to what we were saying before, like that these are the practices that make and sustain our worlds, these underappreciated strategies that whilst invisible or often invisible are also, you might say, quietly political or radical.

But also it reminds us that care is not something new.

And I find the language of crisis quite problematic in some ways, or certainly how it's used in public discourse.

Because for many people, the world has long been precarious and violent, and care, not as a romantic, touchy-feely, always positive practice, but as a strategy for survival within the world, has been fundamental.

So Rebekka, is there a particular definition or framework that you turn to?

I mean, like Megan said, it's hard to choose because there's so much interesting work on the topic.

But I thought to maybe add like a bit of a new or different aspect to our conversation.

So there is this concept of care aesthetics by theatre scholar and practitioner James Thompson, which I know, Olivia, you work with as well, which I think is really interesting.

So he writes how the making of art can be an act of care, but also how care actually has a certain artistry, or it's kind of craft-like.

It involves the creation of sensory and embodied experiences.

And I think that actually really makes sense if we think about, pay attention to the aesthetics of everyday care.

So for example, when I was quite ill, I guess like all of us in London winter, the other day my flatmate had brought me like a beautifully laid breakfast tray to bed.

And so that act of her care for me involved an aesthetic practice.

Or for example, in my project, I had to think of one of my research participants who's living in temporary accommodation in London.

which basically means that they might be evicted from any day, even though sometimes they might live there for years, but you never know.

And so she told me how like she's making that temporary accommodation, that space like as nice and comfortable as possible for her and her children.

So basically her way of caring for herself and her family involves these aesthetic practices of caring for their home space.

And I think that's actually a really powerful form of refusal and resistance to this never ending temporariness and insecurity

that the hostile environment really traps migrants in.

Thanks, Rebekka.

Yeah, I also find the idea of care aesthetics useful and in fact interesting to think about in relation to these underappreciated strategies in that Hobart and Nees quotation that you talked about.

In many ways, care aesthetics invites us to shine a light on or to see the aesthetic, embodied and material qualities of these underappreciated strategies of survival or radical care.

So in these examples, we can identify some different approaches to care as ethics and politics, as labour, albeit undervalued and invisibilized, and as relational practice.

But how are these different ways of approaching care useful in the context of migration?

Rebekka, what does it mean to treat care as politics or ethics?

So I think there's a lot of work from radical feminists, decolonial and also black feminist scholarship who have all long written on care sort of not only as a subject of study that has always mattered to women's intersectional political struggles, but basically suggested care as an alternative ethical or moral or political framework.

And I think that's because I'm really broadly generalizing here, but a lot of feminist and decolonial critique has always put an emphasis on firstly, like location, context and positionality.

Then secondly, on relations, on dialogue and collaboration.

And thirdly, on epistemologies that are grounded in lived experience where practice cannot be thought separately from theory.

And so coming from this perspective, also our moral or political principles and our ethical accountability have to be developed within these concrete locations and moments and relationships and knowledges.

And that might actually sound obvious or not that brilliant now, but thinking about it, it's really a remarkably different

starting point to think about ethics and politics as a situated relational practice and not as sort of supposedly abstract and universal principles that are formulated from above and that are sort of completely detached from emotions and the actors involved and historical and current social context.

Yeah, that point you make about context and situatedness I think is really important.

And I've been drawn to the work of geographer Parvati Raghuram.

who's critiqued feminist care ethics for its Eurocentrism.

And in a paper that she published in 2016, she talks about the ways in which care is often, and I'm quoting, theorized through the experiences of the unnamed white body.

So this tendency to privilege only certain ways of knowing care.

And I think that in the context of migration, this notion of rethinking care ethics beyond the global north, to quote again, seems particularly pertinent in a world shaped by mobility, displacement, dispossession.

It seems vital to think about what happens when different understandings of care come together.

And in my work, I talk about this in terms of different care knowledges and what happens when these come together.

But Megan, what about the idea of care as a form of labour?

This takes us back to the previous season of Between Borders.

where they talked about precarious labour in episode 2 on reproductive justice.

But how does this link to care?

Yeah, so a lot of research on care and migration actually focuses on the paid care work done by people in caring jobs, like nurses, cleaners, nannies, domestic workers.

And across much of the global north, populations are getting older, more parents are working outside the home, and funding for public services is being cut.

And the research shows that these caretaking roles are then often taken up by predominantly women from the Global South in what scholars call global care chains or the international division of reproductive labour.

So this makes it possible for wealthier countries to manage their own care crises while continuing to cut funds to public welfare, bringing in migrant workers to fill the gaps, often for lower pay.

I mean, if we look at the NHS alone, over 1/5 of its staff is made up of people who've moved to the UK

somewhere else to work.

And at the same time, of course, many migrants in the UK are excluded from full access to those same health services.

I think what's important to note is this idea of global care chains and care deficits has been really powerful in showing us how care is organized across borders and how deeply unequal that system is.

But it also, I suppose, only shows us one perspective on how migration and care link together, because it focuses so heavily on employment, approaching care like this conceptually, sometimes risk narrowing what we think care is and who we think counts as a carer for.

For example, it often leaves out men who do both paid and unpaid care work, as well as the kind of informal care that people practice outside of paid jobs.

And of course, migrants whose legal status excludes them from paid work altogether, like people who are seeking asylum, undocumented migrants and others without a right to work.

Thanks, Megan.

Yeah, like you say, and as our whole conversation shows, many forms of care and the people who perform it are invisible or invisibilized.

Even though care underpins so many processes and structures that are vital to building, repairing and maintaining our worlds, so we all care and are cared for in ways that we may not even have thought about.

So it seems that all the examples that we've given show the possibilities of care and its kind of radical potential, but also the tensions inherent in the term.

But

Rebekka, what can a critical perspective on care look like?

So what does it mean to think critically with care?

And I suppose, how is it useful?

Yeah, I think, I mean, as we already mentioned a few times today, but a critical engagement with care really requires of reckoning with its colonial, its racialized and deeply gendered histories.

and kind of refusing these more romantic associations of care as like an innocent gesture of rescue or sympathy, charity or compassion.

And that also means to kind of really challenge normative emotional associations of care.

So like care associated with positive feelings, something that's naturally good, soothing and inherently feminine.

And for example, in my own work, I really think a lot about care in the context of research methods and ethics.

and kind of drawing attention to these more messy and sometimes uncomfortable emotional sort of entanglements and interactions of what a caring practice might look like in reality.

And I know that we'll speak about that more in future episodes.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

So I suppose in this sense, care can offer an alternative politics, especially in the context of racialized and oppressive border regimes.

But radical care isn't necessarily overtly political in the sense of protest or these visible vocal forms of resisting, but in some ways quietly resistant through these strategies.

And also that it doesn't become defined just by the powers that seek to suppress it.

Megan, can you talk a bit more about this critical perspective on care and in particular how it might be useful in migration contexts?

Yeah, I think that's really important.

And it makes me think of a conversation I was having with one of the women who took part in my recent research.

And she was seeking asylum here in the UK.

And we were using Photovoice, which is a method where participants take photographs to critically reflect on and speak about their experiences.

And so when we were looking at her photographs together, she actually identified care as a central theme throughout them.

she said that it's everything.

She talked about care as necessary to survival, as a roof over her head and knowing that she had somewhere where she could eat something, but also in these more emotional and relational terms about her family, her friends and caring interactions she'd had with strangers.

And she also showed me photographs of her college classes and a sewing group that she joined.

And she was talking about how these activities had helped her to rediscover parts of herself that she thought she'd lost and begin to imagine her future again, despite the uncertainty of living within the asylum system.

And I think that really speaks to the significance of how we think about these critical concepts of care in migration contexts.

in a system that often produces so much isolation, so much precarity and harm, these caring practices can resist these logics and help us to create spaces where the richness of people's caring lives are recognised.

Thanks, Megan.

That's a really powerful example and I think a good place for us to draw our discussion to a close.

I think what's really come out here is the very expansive nature of care, that it can mean so many things and is practiced in multiple ways within, but also in resistance to relations of power and control.

The care is always around us, but we need to care to notice it.

And I find it useful to think about care as something that avoids fixed definition, precisely because it is defined through interrelations with other humans or more than human forms.

So just to wrap up, in this episode we've introduced the concept of care and why it has become particularly salient in the current moment.

A context marked by overlapping global crises, the cutback of public services, and surging racialized violence shaping increasingly hostile migration and welfare regimes in the UK and beyond.

And rather than offering fixed definitions,

We've talked about scholarship that invites us to think about care, not as an end point or as a solution, but as an unresolved question and provocation.

And don't forget to look at our show notes, in which we've also included some questions to guide you through the episode, as well as to reflect further on the ideas that we've introduced.

In the next episodes, we'll explore these questions more concretely in relation to migration, borders, research, activism, and also in relation to research methods and ethics.

Thank you Rebekka and Megan for a really powerful conversation and thank you to Birkbeck University for hosting the second season of Between Borders.

Thank you for listening and for staying with the trouble of care in these uncaring times.