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This article examines the production, working and impact of the UK's hostile environment on migrant families with precarious legal status. Our approach is informed by two bodies of scholarly work: critical border studies and research on migrant families. We bridge these literatures to show how the hostile environment is neither a singular, neatly bounded space, nor limited to a set of interactions between immigration enforcement and a clear-cut group of people (so-called 'illegal immigrants'). It affects the lives of a wider segment of the UK population, in particular racialised migrants and citizens, by making their legal status more insecure and precarious, and percolates in multiple and intersecting domains in the lives of families, such as education, housing and welfare, making them ambivalent sites of protection and safety as well as control and enforcement. Drawing on ethnographic engagement with families with insecure immigration statuses, we explore how the hostile environment manifests in the everyday lives of families; how the hostile environment circulates and is re-enacted within the micro-politics of families; and how families negotiate the continuous work of protecting children from the effects of the hostile environment. In conclusion we argue that dramatic and rapid shifts in immigration rules and regulations undermine the capacity of mothers to navigate the policy environment and welfare for their children and to shield them from the consequences of state-driven hostility towards immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines adult social care policy in Wales. It argues that successive Welsh Governments have sought to develop policy which rejects the principles of marketisation and individualisation that have characterised the public sector policy of UK governments for decades, and upholds instead a distinctive set of socialist-inclined values. It assesses whether Welsh social care policy and legislation effectively diverge from the Westminster paradigm, and how Welsh Governments have dealt with the narrative of 'personalisation' which dominates social care discussion elsewhere in the UK. It finds that Welsh Governments have to date struggled to craft social care policies that incorporate their stated principles, explores the difficulties inherent in superimposing new principles on inherited policy narratives and mechanisms, and considers the implications for devolved policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory forums, in which lay citizens or users of public services contribute to the governance of public services, have proliferated in recent years. In debates about the quality and influence of such processes, there has been increasing recognition of the importance of emotional as well as rational deliberation, and criticism of the way in which the structures imposed on such forums can exclude certain participants and discourses. This paper presents a study of one such forum, convened by an independent organization to influence the development and management of state services, and governed by self-determined norms of participation and conduct. It highlights both the potential of such public deliberations beyond the state to generate novel outputs that influence public-service provision, but also the way in which such forums, and their lack of imposed rules and norms of deliberation, can themselves work to exclude certain participants and discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarizes the findings of a project investigating women’s experiences with the Canadian child protection (CPS) and family law (FLS) systems. We examine both service systems together here because although both privilege children’s best interests as their primary consideration and define the concept similarly, the two systems diverge in their expectations of women relative to child custody. While FLS requires women to accept custody arrangements that provide close and continued contact between themselves and their former abusive partners, CPS expects women to leave these same abusive partners or risk removal of their children. The results of thirty-five qualitative interviews with women demonstrate their struggles, firstly, in having their experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV) recognized by professionals in the FLS, and, secondly, in becoming caught between the opposing expectations of CPS and FLS while not receiving help from either. Recommendations for change to improve these services are included in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]