Taking shadow infrastructures of care seriously: towards more caring futures with women from migrant and refugee backgrounds in Newcastle, Australia

Caring well with people from migrant and refugee backgrounds in Australia relies on a complex web of care supports. Research into the kinds of care needed to create flourishing lives for these communities is growing. Within the Australian context, care is shaped by a web of interelated policies, frameworks and settlement expectations determined by the Australian Federal Government and constrained by ongoing neoliberal restructuring. However, many care providers remain illegible to government policy and funding. In this paper, we consider one such place – Zara’s House which provides support for women and children from migrant and refugee backgrounds. We draw on the framework of shadow infrastructures of care to pattern the spaces, people and radical caring qualities of Zara’s House. We argue such spaces function in the shadows in careful and intentional ways and, in doing so, they enact radical care that goes beyond other care practices. By attending to the ways that Zara’s House enacts shadow care infrastructures, this paper expands on existing work on what it means to care well in structurally constrained times and offers future research directions to understand the possibilities and limitations of shadow infrastructures of care.