Precarious Motherhood

Precarious Motherhood explores the experiences of racially minoritised mothers living with insecure immigration status and financial hardship in London, UK. It exposes the impact of hostile immigration policies and precarity on mothers’ interpersonal relationships and access to support. The author draws attention to how mothers manage the constraints they face and enact belonging. She then explores the impact on mothers’ couple relationships, friendships, adult kin relationships and faith-based networks. The book underlines the vital role of personal relationships in providing access to resources and support, but also demonstrates how precariously positioned mothers must carefully navigate relational tensions in their everyday lives. It highlights how social infrastructure facilitates relational practices, helping mothers to sustain their children’s wellbeing and their own.

Praise for Precarious Motherhood

‘Rachel Benchekroun shows how mothers living without citizenship in a migrant community in Britain navigate kin networks to guard against immigration policies designed to undermine their social connections…This book deftly analyses alternative avenues to community well-being in a context of state violence.’
Ruth Gomberg, Critical Urban Anthropology Association

‘This beautifully written and meticulously researched ethnography captures vividly and with deep humanity the richness and complexities of migrant mothers’ lives as they navigate the violence of hostile immigration policies. Profoundly social, intimate and relational yet never losing sight of powerful exclusionary structures, Precarious Motherhood is accessible, thoughtful and illuminating.’
Cecilia Menjívar, University of California, Los Angeles

‘Precarious Motherhood brilliantly captures the resilience of migrant mothers as they engage in “strategic mothering” – crafting networks of care and belonging against the backdrop of hostile immigration policies.’
Jessica Potter, Patients Not Passports Campaign

‘In this book, drawing on the powerful narratives of 22 mothers, Rachel Benchekroun offers a searing analysis of the reality of being a migrant without recourse to public funds in twenty-first century Britain.’
Louise Ryan, London Metropolitan University

‘This invaluable research show how hostile environment policies, high fees and prolonged temporary immigration status have damaged the lives of migrant mothers and their children.’
Colin Yeo, barrister and author