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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how whiteness is reproduced through institutional uncare. Based on ethnography with undocumented women care workers in Brussels, it conceptualises uncare as necropolitical governance that makes prolonged exhaustion survivable for some while life-threatening for others.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how whiteness is sustained and reproduced not only through regimes of care and protection, but through the uneven distribution of institutional uncare at and within the border. Drawing on ethnographic research with undocumented women engaged in domestic and care labour in Brussels, we analyse uncare as a necropolitical technology that exposes some lives to lethal mental exhaustion and bodily usure, while rendering such exposure survivable for others.

Building on necropolitical scholarship, we conceptualise uncare as the routinised withdrawal or deferral of care in the management of workers’ sickness through labour and legal regulation. For undocumented workers, institutional care is exemplified in bureaucratic deferral, barriers to care, and emergency-only forms of medical treatment that prioritise immediate stabilisation over recovery. Rather than treating uncare as absence or neglect, we approach it as a structured mode of governance that differentially allocates livability. We argue that whiteness operates here not as a fixed identity or phenotype, but as a positionality from which institutional uncare towards migrants remains morally legible and politically tolerable.

By asking “who can afford uncare,” the paper shifts analytical attention from overt exclusion to the background conditions that make institutional abandonment survivable for some and life-threatening for others. In doing so, it contributes to debates on whiteness by foregrounding its ambivalent, infrastructural, and embodied dimensions, and by demonstrating how necropolitical governance operates through differential endurance rather than direct killing.