This open access book critically examines how discourses and policies target and exclude migrants and their families in Europe and North America along racial, gender and sexuality lines, and how these exclusions are experienced and resisted. Building on the influential notion of intersectional borderings, it delves deep into how these discourses converge and diverge, highlighting the underlying normative constructs of family, gender, and sexuality. First, it examines how radical-right and conservative political movements perpetuate exclusionary practices and how they become institutionalized in migration, welfare, and family policies. Second, it examines the dynamic responses they provoke—both resistance and reinforcement—among those affected in their everyday lives. Bringing together studies from political and social sciences, it offers a vital contribution to the expanding field of migrant family governance and exclusion and is essential for understanding the complex processes of exclusion and the movements that challenge and sustain them. It expands academic discussions on populism and the politics of exclusion by linking them to the politicization of intimacy and family life. With diverse case studies from Europe, North, and Central America, it appeals to students, academics, and policymakers, informing future mobilizations against discriminatory and exclusionary tendencies in politics and society.
Table of Contents:
PART 1. Intersectional Borderings Across Political Discourses, Policy Narratives and Actual Policies.- 1. (Un)rightful Entitlements: Exploring the Populist Narratives of Welfare Chauvinism and Welfare Nostalgia (Sonja Blum).- 2. The Rhetoric of Reaction in Spain: Radical Right, Gender, and Immigration (Belén Fernández-Suárez).- 3. The Right Kind of Family, the Right Kind of Migrant: Welfare and Immigration in Poland Before and After the Populist Turn (Anna Safuta).- 4. The “Zero Tolerance Policy” to Separate Migrant Families: Context and Discursive Strategies to Foster Exclusion (Alejandra Díaz de León and Guillermo Yrizar Barbosa).- 5. The Action Repertoires of the International Organization for the Family - Transnationalizing Far-Right Family Politics (Timo Koch).- PART 2. Experiencing, Practising and Resisting Everyday Intersectional Borderings.- 6. Anti-Sexism as Weaponized Discourse against Muslim Immigration: A View from Social Psychology (Pascaline Van Oost, Olivier Klein, and Vincent Yzerbyt).- 7. ‘To have security, to have access to life’: Queer Ambivalence at the Borders of Marriage and the Nation (Amy Brainer).- 8. “It is not the Netherlands here.” How Parents of LGB Migrants Experience Everyday Bordering against Nonheterosexual Belonging in CEE (Tanja Vuckovic Juros).- 9. Dreamers Moms and Their Struggle for Legal Reunification: Maternal Acts of Public Disclosure as a Form of Constructive Resistance (Erika Busse and Veronica Montes).
About the Author :
Prof. Laura Merla is a Sociologist with a background in Political science, and a professor at the University of Louvain (Belgium) where she is the Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Families and Sexualities (CIRFASE). She is also a member of the Belgian Royal Academy, and the Vice-President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on the Sociology of Migration. Her main research areas are the sociology of the family; migration, transnational families and care; ageing; social policies; and gender and masculinities.
Prof. Sarah Murru is a Sociologist with a background in Political sciences, and a professor at KU Leuven (Belgium). She is a member of the Center for Sociological Research (CeSO – KU Leuven), a research associate to the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Families and Sexualities (CIRFASE) at UCLouvain, and co-coordinator of the international Resistance Studies Network. Her expertise lies in the Sociology of Diversity, Resistance Studies, and Gender Studies, especially Feminist research and Institutional Ethnography. She has worked on youth and family research, as well as on mobility and migration. As an institutional ethnographer, she is interested in understanding how institutions socially organize people’s everyday lives.
At the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy of Ghent University (Belgium), Dr. Giacomo Orsini coordinates the inter-university research consortium REFUFAM exploring how policy and administrative complexity impact refugee families ‘inclusion pathways in Belgium, and the international thematic network DERM concerned with the Decolonization of Education and Research on Migration. He is also lecturer on migration, race, ethnicity and the politics of diversity at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In the past, Orsini has conducted studies on unaccompanied minors’ migration into Europe and the structural violence they face along their trajectories, institutional racism within family reunification in Belgium, and Europe’s external border management. His scholarship concentrates on the (coloniality of the) everyday governance of migration and the multiplication of tangible and intangible borders of (racist) exclusion and inclusion.
Dr Tanja Vuckovic Juros is a Sociologist working at the intersections of cultural and political sociology. She is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie (MSCA) post-doctoral research fellow at the Faculty at the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb (Croatia) where she is finalizing a project on how citizens respond to gender and sexuality messages in different socio-cultural contexts. Her work often examines relations between institutional frameworks, normative orders, and the active-meaning making of individuals, focusing most recently on families and sexualities, and anti-gender mobilizations. She is currently a board member of the Euroepan Sociological Association’s Research Network Sexuality and a member of a COST action LGBTI+ Social and Economic (in)equalities.
