DOI: 10.5255/ukda-sn-856229
title: Everyday Bordering in the UK: The Impact on Social Care Practitioners and the Migrant Families With Whom They Work, 2020-2022

description: Data are transcripts based on focus groups and qualitative interviews with social care practitioners, and interviews with members of migrant families living in the UK. Practitioner data relates to focus groups, and some interviews, conducted at the start of the study which then informed the content of one-to-one ‘mid-point’ interviews with other practitioners. Professional groups represented are linked to anonymised collaborating organisations, including: educators, family support workers, social workers and youth and community workers. Further data is based on interviews conducted with practitioners ‘external’ to the collaborating organisation, most of whom were qualified social workers. Data generated via work with migrant families include transcripts from interviews with members of migrant families. Some were interviewed separately, and others in pairs, or as a group of three. Prior to the interviews, participants completed creative diaries. However, these included names, photographs and highly personal accounts. As such, they cannot be anonymised and have not been used as data but, rather an elicitation tool in the interviews. For this reason, the content of the diaries is not shared here. All transcripts have been anonymised. Names have been replaced with pseudonyms and other identifying characteristics have been removed, including the names of identifying collaborating organisations. The study was conducted across two cities that are identified: Hull and Sheffield. For this reason, the cities and the names of some organisations and areas of the city that are referenced have not been changed. The ‘Everyday Bordering in the UK: the impact of everyday bordering on social care practitioners and the migrant families with whom they work’, was a 30-month project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, 2020-2022. The project sought to understand if and how the UK’s increasingly hostile environment towards immigration impacts on social care practitioners and the families that they support. The aims of the project were therefore: to work with social care professionals, (with and without statutory immigration control and/or social care duties), and the migrant families supported by them to understand whether, and to what extent, practices of ‘everyday bordering’ permeate across social care professions working with a range of migrant families (refugees, asylum seekers, EU migrants and third country nationals); and to examine if and how the requirement to enact immigration control in ‘everyday’ professional practice impacts on the support migrant families receive. More broadly, the objectives of the study were: to compare whether and to what extent different social care professionals enact and/or resist ‘everyday’ bordering’ practices in their work with migrant family members, and the forms these practices take; and to understand how migrant individuals identify and experience the performance of these practices. In order to achieve these aims and objectives, the study took a collaborative approach. Through a range of ethnographic activities, we worked with collaborating organisations and their partners to identify participants (practitioner and migrant family members) and to inform and refine the research questions. This included using semi-structed focus groups and interviews with practitioners, and interviews supported by elicitation techniques with members of migrant families. As part of the project, we also conducted creative art workshops to enable migrant family members to identify the ways in which they wanted to represent their experiences of everyday bordering. A group of young family migrant family members that we worked with in Sheffield chose to use photography, and this was exhibited as 'A Tale of Two Sheffields', in partnership with ‘City of Sanctuary – Sheffield’ at the 2022 Migrant Matters Festival. In Hull, family members chose to work with local community artists to create short films of interviews that they curated. These are included as resource in the project output, ‘Working with Migrant Communities: a resource for practitioners’. These activities and creative outputs, underpinned by the findings of the study, gave voice to members of migrant families that told us that they often feel unheard. They have also contributed to addressing a gap in training and resources for practitioners working with migrant family members.