Academic texts are often limited to elite citizens and exclude the marginalised. Restricted by linguistic complexity, institutional gatekeeping and high financial barriers, these texts are often circulated within elite academic circles, reinforcing existing inequalities in knowledge production and consumption. As a result, the ability to participate in scholarly conversations, whether in the social sciences, humanities or other sciences, is limited to those with access to universities, libraries and subscription-based journals. The following interview, conducted over email, is an endeavour to democratise access to academic research. Read the first and second interviews in this series. This interview contains terms such as genocide, death and other words which may trigger you.Rachel Rosen’s work invites us to engage with some of the most urgent questions of our time. Drawing from real-life experiences, her work on children, women, migration, bordering, childhood, care, Palestine and the politics of social reproduction, asks us to look closely at the politics of the ‘individual’ and the ‘self’, especially in the ‘global north.’Her scholarship brings critical attention to the social and political conditions shaping everyday life. Through her work, she examines how power operates across intimate and institutional contexts, challenging dominant assumptions. Rachel Rosen is a sociologist and professor at the University College London. She is the director of the Critical Childhood Studies Centre at UCL. Rachel Rosen. Photo: By arrangement.The following are edited excerpts from our conversation.Union home minister Amit Shah remarked, just a week ago, in Assam, that a third-term Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government “will search out and remove infiltrators.” You argue in your book Bordering Social Reproduction, with Eve Dickson, that “throughout the period, phrases concatenating ‘criminals’ and ‘illegals,’ like Ball’s, were used consistently, serving to discursively link, even equate, irregular immigration status with criminality and thereby justify migrants’ expulsion or refusal” (Bordering Social Reproduction, 2025, p. 31). How do you see migration within the framework of social reproduction, not merely as a border or security question, but as a fundamentally gendered, raced and classed/caste phenomenon, tied to the reproduction of labour and life itself? Thanks for this question, which draws attention to the multiple ways contemporary migration is demonised and penalised. Previous research and migrant justice activism have shown that racial states often use strategies of detention and deportation against people on the move – violent and spectacular ways of making and legitimating national borders.What Eve Dickson and I argue in our work, is the importance of understanding how welfare bordering, or the bordering of social reproduction, operates in tandem with detention and deportation. We use welfare bordering in reference to state welfare policies, but also the myriad of institutions, discourses and practices involved, constraining and contorting the labour of making lives, or their social reproduction. Bordering of social reproduction is designed to make life impossible; a form of invisible bordering internal to the state, but one that affects virtually every aspect of quotidian life.This insight draws on our social research, which focuses on the United Kingdom’s (UK) imposition of a draconian immigration policy, denying some of the most destitute people, the means to life. This policy is masked in the bureaucratic language of ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF), which affects the families we research with. They are unwanted by the state – for racialised, classed and gendered reasons – and are typically impoverished single mothers from Britain’s former colonies and their children. Yet, the state’s putative obligations to children, in this case children born in or living in the UK for most of their lives, mean that these families are ‘un-deportable.’The bordering of social reproduction through NRPF works over time: a slow, grinding process where, in the case of our research, families are made street homeless, forced to live in single rooms without heat or working plumbing, dependent on the kindness of friends or strangers, made vulnerable to hyper exploitation, forced to skip meals, punished for not having the right uniform at school, denied the right to graduate because of debts to the school and treated with contempt and suspicion. Importantly, this happens in the middle of one of the richest countries in the world, with wealth forged through the colonial empire. The imperial irony, here, is that those from (neo)colonies, who financed the infrastructure of the British welfare state, were and are frequently excluded from its provisions and services, even when physically present in the UK.In our view, the effects of NRPF are no accident. Those who have the ‘gall’ to challenge their ascription as unvalued and demonised, whether because of their autonomous movement or persistence in the face of state abandonment, are not just excluded from everyday life, but punished by the state through enforced destitution and debt. The bordering of social reproduction stretches from the body to the psychic, symbolic and material, an existential exercise designed to make life impossible. While our research focuses on a particular group of families with NRPF, we view their experiences as an experiment in the horrific. NRPF, and its punitive effects, are being rapidly expanded to others in the UK. And, the criminalisation of life making, indeed the denial of the possibility of life itself, is a state tactic that is being taken up around the globe.Why do liberal democracies, precisely those states that claim the strongest commitment to rights and the rule of law, appear so structurally compelled to criminalise migration and those who migrate? Who does the state construct as desirable and legitimate claimant of territory, belonging and social reproduction and who is cast as undesirable, as a body to be sorted, suspended or expelled? You raise, here, several critical and urgent points about how human mobility is understood, narratively framed and with what affects, especially for people on the move.One way to tackle this important question, is by recognising the historical fact that people have always moved. Mobility is part of the human condition – something that is quite easy to forget in this time of, frankly, quite rabid anti-migrant sentiment, where mobility of certain kinds is treated as a crime. Taking a historical perspective on human mobility helps us to sort through the differences between mobility that is criminalised and that which is valorised, and how this dynamic has changed over time. This is a profoundly classed, raced and gendered distinction. For instance, the disparity between ‘golden visas’ given to those with large independent wealth, who are typically not considered ‘migrants’ at all, and the detention, deportation and welfare bordering working class people are subjected to, especially those engaged in autonomous migration. Thus, the first point to make is that ‘the migrant’ is a figure or a category that is already Othered, a profoundly racialised category. The racialised migrant, we can say, is produced as a ‘them’ to an imaginary national ‘we.’ Othered as mobile rather than sedentary, given nationalist terms of belonging, criminalised for non-state sanctioned mobility regardless of the lack of possible forms of movement and demonised for crossing global colour lines. It is, perhaps, for this reason that pro-migrant social movements claim: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” evocative words that point towards the violence which borders enact and sustain.Following from this first point, there is no doubt that there has been an absolute proliferation of borders, a multiplication as Mezzadra and Neilson put it, in the past few decades. Nation states, especially those with ethno-nationalist characteristics, are made as much by who is included as they are by who is excluded, degraded and rendered disposable, or as you say, who is criminalised and rendered illegal. Additionally, borders, both external and internal, are key to this process. But for what purpose, we might ask, are borders propagating so voraciously?Discontent is rising in the face of deepening precarity, environmental end games, profound and rising wealth inequality and the absolute surplusification of labouring populations, not least in the face of artificial intelligence (AI) transformations. Capitalists need a boogey man to protect their interests and the ‘migrant Other’ is one such attempt. Detention, surveillance, deportation and other border technologies are also big and growing sites of business, expanding markets which, alongside welfare bordering, create conditions of super exploitability by placing migrants in the condition of deportability, as Nicholas De Genova noted. We see this all playing out in our research. NRPF is both a symptom of the racialised state, reinforcing the idea that redistribution is ‘for our own,’ even as the British state has been, and continues to be, funded through imperial extraction. NRPF also makes the racialised state by determining who qualifies for social support, precisely an act involved in its construction. NRPF is a means for demarcating and differentiating migrants as the constitutive outside of the nation, in increasingly microscopic and ever-expanding ways.You write, “’They give me good advice. They help me through things,’ Miriam commented one day about Serwah, Luke and Joshua. ‘We have a close bond with each other.’ The family often did research activities together.” How do migrant families, living under conditions of legal precarity, surveillance and what you describe as the bordering of everyday life, actively construct and sustain solidarity, not only despite their circumstances but often through them? Is precarity, paradoxically, a melting pot for community? One of the things we grapple with in our research is how to make visible the extreme precarity, intentionally produced by the state through the bordering of social reproducing, while not reducing our participants’ lives to this violence. This concern is borne out of our close engagements with families with NRPF. The small window Serwah, Miriam, Luke and Joshua offered us into their lives, for example, lays to rest any notion of lives stripped of meaning. Instead, we caught glimpses of a family engrossed in the labour of sustenance, care and meaning making together, in and against the world, despite a state seeking to render them vulnerable and destitute. The concern also reflects debates surrounding social reproduction. Shirin Rai points to the ‘depleting’ effects of social reproduction when the ‘outflows’ of labour are more than ‘inflows,’ that sustain and nourish. This understanding would include those social supports denied to families with NRPF. On the other hand, we have scholars who emphasise the family, and any reproductive labour that occurs within it, as necessarily replenishing, loving and potentially generative of resistance to the very structures of injustice which deplete. To put this debate in the starkest terms and risk creating a bit of a straw man, neither a pure calculus of augmentation-minus-depletion nor a valorisation of institutions like the family which are themselves shot through with inequities, quite capture the lives our interlocutors have shared with us.In response, we develop the idea of “weathering through social reproduction” in our work to keep alive the complex interplay between bordering that makes lives impossible and the lives of people who refuse to accept such impossibilities. Our jump off point is Marxist feminist scholars who point to the contradictory character of reproductive labour, a source of both life and exploitation because of its production of the labour power capitalist oppression relies on. We demonstrate how migrant families refuse existential erasure and punitive conditions of enforced destitution, while simultaneously living their violence. The analytic of weathering we develop, draws attention to processes of wearing, withstanding, fortification and toughening, allowing for engagement with the dynamic and multi-faceted ways in which mothers and children in precarious migrancy plan, calculate, strategise and navigate under conditions of duress.Gargi Bhattacharyya has a wonderful turn of phrase, highlighting that practices and things that people hold most dear are not separate from the violences they live, but arise ‘in dialogue.’ We came to their idea late in our writing, however, it very much encapsulates how we think about weathering.The creative familial practices described by Miriam are ones they must, and do, develop to sustain themselves, striving to assign and maintain the value of their lives. These practices cannot end racialised border violences or ensure that human needs are met. But, they indicate the limitations, and indeed the fragilities, of welfare as a site of bordering and social reproduction as a terrain of contestation. While the racial state may treat these families as disposable, their insistence on planning for future, nurturing common cause, is a challenge to this attempt at erasure and denial, a form of resistance.I wish to turn now from Bordering Social Reproduction to your work on Palestine and childhood. All of us have recently seen the live genocide of children in both Palestine and Iran. You write in a piece for The Conversation, “Palestinian children in Gaza have been telling their stories to a global audience. The killing, injury and starvation they are testifying to have proved a powerful counter-narrative to the idea that Israel is simply “defending itself.” International humanitarian law states that: ‘Children affected by armed conflict are entitled to special respect and protection.’ But in Gaza, children are being killed in their thousands.” There is something paradoxical here. In a deeply interconnected world, on the one hand we see the death of children filmed and their words broadcasted, while on the other, the simultaneous structural, or one might call ‘deliberate abandonment,’ by the international community and legal architecture. How do you make sense of this contradiction? Yes. Profound and egregious violence against children in Gaza has been live-streamed to the world, throughout Israel’s western-backed genocide against Palestinians. These testimonies are coming from Palestinian children, adults and others. To take but one example, foreign medics who have spent time in Gaza have provided x-ray evidence that children are being deliberately targeted by the occupation, shot in the head or neck.Previously, I was speaking about bordering social reproduction, denying the means of life and making to migrant families as a form of internal expulsion and punishment. In Palestine, and Gaza in particular, the Israeli settler state is not only destroying the means of life for Palestinians, it is operating against the reproduction of Palestinian life itself – a process Mai Abu-Moghli and I call “social reproducticide.”This effort to foreclose Palestinian existence is happening through the targeting of the Palestinian child. As you ask: in a world that purports to protect children above all else, and indeed often places ultimate moral value on the way they are treated, how is it possible that the global community has not acted in the face of the knowledge that Palestinian children are being killed by design?Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian tells us about ‘unchilding,’ the violent and racialised process whereby Palestinian children are dispossessed from childhood, as well as the value, rights and protection the category of childhood might otherwise accord them. Rather than being seen as ‘children,’ they are rendered as a racialised threat from birth by the settler colonial state, and therefore, ejected from the category of childhood entirely.I will never forget how the western media has contributed to this acute dehumanisation of young Palestinians, facilitating their ‘deliberate abandonment’ as you put it, by the international community. I am haunted by the Sky News reporter who referred to the “stray bullet” which “found its way into a van” and “killed a three or four-year-old young lady.”That Palestinian children’s lives are rendered disposable and ungrievable by forces of colonial racial capitalism, shows so clearly both the Palestine exception at play and the exceptional malleability of the category of childhood. It is easily reconstituted in ways that exclude or preclude the marginalised from the respect and protection the classification may otherwise offer.The answer to my mind, however, is not to widen the category or gain inclusion into it. That brings its own problems, not least it sets up other exclusions often making the lives of adults with whom marginalised children live appear undeserving.Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, assistant professor of native and indigenous studies at Yale University, and Tamara Kneese, assistant professor of media studies and director of gender and sexualities studies at the University of San Francisco, describe “radical care” as a set of vital yet under-recognised strategies that help people endure precarious worlds. Your work similarly invites readers to think about how solidarities must be built to counteract. In a society as fragmented and deeply divided as ours, what possibilities exist for building such solidarities? And, where might we locate hope for collective repair and resistance?It is a difficult moment in history, one in which it can be hard to find bearings for ‘collective repair and resistance.’ But tuning out, or turning away at this moment, is not a luxury we can afford. Mariame Kaba talks about hope as a discipline, putting one foot in front of the other despite fears and concerns. The act of doing so, and doing so with others, Chandra Mohanty states, is what generates common cause, strength, imaginaries of liberated futures and practices of presence, or those things we want to bring into our world. One of the places where I think we can look for the strength, is the everyday lives of people who insist on life and existence in the face of brutal efforts to deny or destroy the means of life. The Palestinian children you mentioned earlier are not just exposing settler violence, they are showing the world how to live, how to struggle, and how to love, not that they must, but in their assertion of existence and the knowledge that one day liberation will come, they are. The analytic of weathering encourages us to be on the lookout for such efforts, attending to the ways, for instance, people with NRPF use time as a weapon of the weak against the violence of time, put to work by welfare bordering.What about those of us who do not have these experiences? Solidarity has become somewhat emptied of its meaning by increasingly being framed as a gift to give. Indigenous activist Lilla Watson reminds us that is not really solidarity at all, but a reinforcement of global inequities and local hierarchies. She encourages us to understand solidarity as “acting with the knowledge our liberation is bound together.”It involves close and careful analysis to understand the connected, but uneven, impacts of racial capitalism. For example, new forms of AI-enabled surveillance tracking have led heinous killing machines in Gaza, like ‘Where’s daddy?,’ which track men into their family homes before bombing them and are now being used to identify, detain and deport migrants and activists. More broadly, endless wars and capitalist extractivism produce dispossession and displacement, while fossil fuel and weapons industries are prioritised over health, education and indeed lives. As Eve and I argue in our book, to effectively contest NRPF and welfare bordering, it is important to understand the concrete conditions in which it plays out, its specific effects, why it persists, and where it is fragile and liable to be overturned.What do you suggest to young scholars and students, especially from the Global South, who wish to do ethnographic work? Or study Sociology. Do you have any reading recommendations for young scholars who wish to do graduate and PhD studies? This is not an easy question! Ethnography and sociology both have complex and problematic histories, objectifying non-European people as part and parcel of (neo)colonial traditions in the former and claiming universalism whilst erasing non-western epistemic traditions in the latter.I am, however, persuaded by authors like Ali Mehji that sociology does not have to be consigned to the dustbin as an always-and-forever form of ‘intellectual imperialism’ – there are ways to connect, dialogue and forge radical traditions of knowledge production across epistemic traditions and material contexts. Similarly, I am inspired by the authors of Decolonizing Ethnography who explore the potentials of doing anti-colonial research. In their work, ethnography becomes a collective practice between academics and undocumented people in the United States. It engages with different traditions and forms of knowledge production. It turns the gaze on to the material structures which exploit, enforce destitution and produce carcerality, seeking to produce knowledge that can aid their undoing.This suggests the urgency of asking: Who will benefit from this knowledge? How, and in what ways, does it help in diagnosing our current predicaments and what space does it open up for imagining a world otherwise? How can I hold myself ethically and politically answerable to those who share their lives with me, along with questions of justice and liberation? I am currently reading a wonderful book by Nasser Abourahme called The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025). It responds in an exciting way to these questions. I find myself returning again and again to his conclusions about dwelling in; inhabiting. Thinking from the camp, which makes border regimes possible, and with the dispossessed who inhabit the camp, Abourahme encourages us to think not in the empty liberal content of citizenship and rights, but in “inhabitation [as] the life-making practice of the dispossessed everywhere” (p. 169). This is neither ‘settling’ nor ‘domesticating,’ instead, he argues, the camp teaches us about “assembl[ing] political community beyond the territorialities of the colonial border regime and to enact a borderless world in practice.”Learning from and with our interlocutors, especially those who have faced persistent devaluation and demonisation, is a privilege. But, to bear witness through research brings with it a profound responsibility – a responsibility to do all we can to transform the conditions that allow such extractive violence and erasure to persist.Rajesh Ranjan is a Chevening scholar, lawyer and researcher based in London and can be reached at rajeshranjannluj@gmail.com.