Paper short abstract:

In the UK, asylum seekers are dependent on a form of state support that mandates inhabitancy of precarious and temporary housing. In this context, mobilizing suffering through social networks is a way for mothers to request better living conditions from the state.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, the provision of asylum housing has emerged as an extension of the UK's migration governance agenda, mapping onto the iteration of bordering techniques introduced by the so called British “hostile environment”. Forced to inhabit temporal and precarious accommodations while they wait for a resolution of their claim, mothers in the asylum system believe that current housing politics are built with the purpose of “making people sick, so that they leave”. In this context, mobilizing suffering becomes a means to request better living conditions from the state. As mothers seek letters of medical evidence to have a say in where and how they live, their stories of affliction become a way to trace the different ways in which care structures the possibilities and impossibilities for migrant life in the UK. Their testimonies of illness and affliction map how asylum politics fold into the domestic space, becoming inscribed in their children’s bodies, but they also weave together the care practices, relations and trajectories mothers engage with when material and physical infrastructures of state care provision fail. Their evidence speaks to questions of claiming care and forging ways to care through the social networks they thread with health care providers, charity workers, volunteers and other asylum seekers living in hotel rooms. This paper considers how, in capturing the harmful effects of asylum housing, mothers index the forms of care they negotiate everyday to repair harm and contest the exclusionary logics of bordering Britain by making their families sick.