Careless Bordering

Situated within the sociology of migration, this thesis offers a detailed Photovoice account of the everyday lives of people seeking asylum or with refugee status in Lancaster and Morecambe, Northwest England. It draws on original empirical research co-produced with twenty asylum-seeking or refugee participants, combining visual methods with conversational and interview-based methods to produce 250 photographs and take part in 14 in-depth photo conversation sessions which culminated in a co-organised photography exhibition. It explores carelessness as a structuring logic of contemporary bordering regimes, a logic that is both violent and banal, and which has thus far been under-acknowledged within migration studies. This research takes as its starting point the need to centre experiences of borders and bordering from below, foregrounding the everyday encounters, struggles, and resistances of those who are most precariously positioned in relation to the shifting regimes of state power, immigration control, and the violence of borders. The research was guided by three key research questions, emerging from this central concern. First, what do the visual accounts of people seeking asylum and refugees in Lancaster and Morecambe reveal about their lived experience of borders and the everyday workings of bordering processes? Second, how do bordering processes and migration policies in the UK operationalise care and control in their treatment of refugees and people seeking asylum? Third, what informal care practices do refugees and people seeking asylum engage in within contexts of precarity and exclusion? By centring the informal, everyday care practices of refugees and people seeking asylum, this thesis offers a crucial intervention in both migration studies and scholarship on care. The research examines the relationship between the carelessness of immigration policies and state institutions, and the varied ways in which people respond through practices of care and resistance. It brings to light the ways in which people seeking asylum or with refugee status engage in acts of mutual social support and selfcare, and how they navigate the entanglement of care and control in their daily lives. Through the concept of careless bordering, the thesis advances understandings of the affective and moral dimensions of bordering regimes. It demonstrates how care and bordering are not separate but co-constituted practices. This double bind reveals care as a site of governance within the asylum system where the state’s moral distancing through its refusal to assume responsibility for the welfare of certain kinds of migrants becomes a key mechanism of bordering.