Paper short abstract:

For Amira, taking the bus every morning was a dreaded yet necessary part of her everyday life. This paper explores the social infrastructures that refugee women as mothers occupy in the East of England. I will examine the bus, as a space that is both desired and rejected by refugee mothers.

Paper long abstract:

Social infrastructures (Klinenberg 2018) have been ethnographically studied across different urban and rural spaces as places that allow people to settle and thrive, and where social connections are constructed and enabled (e.g. Wessendorf and Gembus 2024). They can include libraries, parks or schools, among others. In this paper I will reflect on the social infrastructures that refugee mothers who had been settled in the UK for several years occupied and as well as the spaces they could not occupy. Over recent years there has been an increased research focus on ‘arrival infrastructures’ for asylum-seekers. In this paper I will examine the social infrastructures that refugee women as mothers used in two cities in the East of England, including charity women’s groups, churches or English language schools, and the bus. I will focus on the latter, the bus as a desired and loathed space. I will focus on the case of Amira who had to take two buses every day to drop her children at school. The bus became a place that allowed her to access her children’s education and where she met her best friend, who overheard her speaking in Arabic. However, for Amira the bus represents everything she does not like about her precarious life in England, and a place she does not wish to occupy. In this paper, I argue that social infrastructures are not always desired and how this tension plays in refugee women’s lives.