In this episode, host Megan Crossley (Lancaster University) speaks to Franca Roeschert (University of Greenwich), Rachel Benchekroun (University College London) and Giorgia Previdoli (University of York) about how people with precarious immigration status in the UK give, receive and experience care in their daily lives. We reflect on what it means to care and be cared for in the context of people with precarious immigration status experiencing carelessness by the state.

We discuss carelessness through policies such as No Recourse to Public Funds, hostile media narratives and the constant insecurities of living in temporary accommodation. While these filter into people’s everyday lives, we describe acts of care we witnessed in our research: people sharing a meal, asking for help and looking out for each other in various contexts.

We reflect on how the physical design of community spaces, from food pantries to community kitchens, can open up or foreclose conditions for connection, and why caring spaces are so often the first casualties of funding cuts.

Plus: we make the case for care needing to be understood as reciprocal and multi-directional and why attending to small, informal, often invisible practices matters if we want to envision a more caring (and more just) future.

Mentioned resources:

• Fair Food Futures UK Project (funded by NIHR)
• Centre for Collaboration in Community Connectedness

Further suggested resources:

• Benchekroun, R. (2025). Precarious Motherhood: Navigating Relationships and Support Post-Migration in the UK. UCL Press.
• Emejulu, A. (2022). Fugitive feminism. Silver Press.
• Hobart, H. I. J. K., & Kneese, T. (2020). Radical care: Survival strategies for uncertain times. Social Text, 38(1), 1–16.
• Nadasen, P. (2023). Care: The highest stage of capitalism. Haymarket Books.
• Sheringham, O., Taylor, H., & Duffy-Syedi, K. (2024). Care-full resistance to slow violence: Building radical hope through creative encounters with refugees during the pandemic. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 50(13), 3359–3378. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2345999
• Vacchelli, E., & Roeschert, F. (2026). Between solidarity and hostility: exploring the paradox of community through peer research. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2026.2631054

Active listening questions:

• Why should we understand care as more than a uni-directional act?
• What do we mean when we say ‘carelessness of the state’?
• What in your experience contributes to creating conditions for connection and multi-directional care in community and social spaces?