Displaced care and affective inequality. Refugee families’ care work upon resettlement to Denmark

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with families from DR Congo, recently resettled in Denmark through UNHCR, this article explores how resettled families’ capacities to engage in care work are restricted by the current migration regime, which emphasises economic self-sufficiency and geographical dispersal of refugees. The article engages with the concept of affective circuits (Cole, J., and C. Groes. 2016. Affective Circuits: African Migrations to Europe and the Pursuit of Social Regeneration. 1st ed., vol. 57734. The University of Chicago Press) to highlight how affective dimensions of care interweave with material elements, and to show how exerting material care is closely connected to social becoming. It further shows how essential care practices are displaced from the hands of young people and their families to frontline workers in the welfare state, which is argued to lead to what (Lynch, K. 2022. Care and Capitalism. Polity Press) has termed affective inequality. Through engagements with the sociological and anthropological scholarship on everyday care and relational justice, the article argues that the current migration regime in Denmark displaces refugees’ care practices to frontline workers and causes relational injustice.