Precarious Care and (Dis)Connections

Abstract

Abstract. Adult stakeholders who work with separated child migrants (SCMs) face a substantial challenge to their capacity or remit to care amid increasingly hostile immigration environments. This paper explores a diverse range of adult stakeholders' understandings of the care of SCMs, filling an important gap in understanding how care is conceptualized by those working in often complex and contradictory positions. Drawing on the care literature, this study focuses on 15 qualitative semistructured interviews with state and nonstate adult stakeholders in England (e.g., social work, law, police, and NGO workers). We argue that stringent immigration practices, policies, and bureaucratic and structural challenges undoubtedly present personal tensions and professional constraints for those whose role is meant to foreground “care.” Importantly, when taking into account a range of different perspectives, roles, and responsibilities across professions and sectors, our respondents were constrained in varying ways or had varying room to maneuver within their institutional contexts. Our analysis suggests that amid a hostile immigration environment, care connections with and between SCMs are treated with mistrust and are unstable over space and time. We argue that how care is conceptualized and experienced is mutually constituted by hostile policies and procedures, adult stakeholders' roles within or out-with those systems, and their personal values and perspectives. It is within this space where constraints, enablers, and resistances play out. Care is subjectively experienced, and care relationships are open to potential (dis)connection across space and time.