This article investigates how national policy frameworks in Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Uruguay conceptualise transgender inclusion, justice, and state responsibility. Through a comparative documentary analysis of national action plans, it explores tensions between legal recognition and structural justice in countries regarded as global leaders in transgender rights. The findings indicate that advanced legal recognition can coexist with persistent inequality, discrimination, and exclusion. Canada, Denmark, and Norway place greater emphasis on recognition, protection, and institutional inclusion, whereas Uruguay integrates these approaches with a greater focus on historically situated responsibility, structural transformation, and reparative commitments. The article introduces the concept of the legal vanguard paradox to elucidate these tensions.
Palliative care policies struggle with the challenges of social diversity in modern democracies. These policies privilege aspirations toward a ‘good death’ – a death characterized by awareness, preparation, and a desire for healthcare management of prolonged suffering. However, ‘good death’ as a cultural ideal is both a medically misleading and socially unrepresentative concept. As a policy ideal, good death denies: (1) different styles of dying, and (2) its opposite and contiguous social reality – the diverse lifestyle perceptions and experiences of the ‘good life’. This review argues that the challenge and task for inclusive democracies are to create health and social care policies that reflect the characteristic pluralism of their populations, even at the end-of-life itself.
The article introduces the concept of aspirational justice as a critical lens for analysing how social policies shape people's capability to imagine and pursue desirable futures. We conceptualise aspirational justice through three interdependent dimensions – distributive, procedural and epistemic justice – and develop a multi-layered framework for its analysis. Drawing on qualitative research on language and training policies for migrant women in Paris, we advance two main results. First, the capability-enhancing potential of social programmes must be analysed in light of institutional interdependencies. While migrants’ agency is sustained through third-sector organisations, state institutions retain distributive and regulatory powers that shape what futures can be envisioned. Second, aspirational justice cannot be reduced to institutional arrangements alone, it ultimately unfolds within individuals’ lived experience. For migrant women, institutional resources and constraints intersect with gendered care responsibilities and racialised labour-market stratification, narrowing both the range of futures they can envisage and their sense of entitlement to pursue them.
This article examines how activists in the Islamophobia Research Collective in Kerala transform their lived experiences of Islamophobia into systematic documentation, knowledge production, and collective action. Situated within a political landscape reshaped by Hindutva, where Muslims encounter heightened surveillance and constraints on political agency within enduring structural hierarchies, the article traces the Islamophobia Research Collective's emergence from earlier activist networks and the development of an analytical framework centred on direct and indirect Islamophobia. It analyses the everyday practices that sustain this work, including verifying hate speech, documenting Islamophobic incidents, and producing monthly and annual reports, and evaluates their impact both internally on activist subjectivities and externally on public discourse. The analysis shows how locally grounded, community-based activism generates forms of public knowledge, sustains solidarities, and strengthens resistance to Islamophobia in contemporary India.
This article introduces 'symbolic resilience' to explain how governments maintain the appearance of control during crises while limiting culpability. Using 44 interviews with senior prison policymakers and stakeholders, the article analyses prison governance in England and Wales during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that key decisions - adoption of a highly centralised 'gold command' structure, limited early release, and prioritisation of infection metrics - formed a governing strategy that narrowed the criteria through which policy success was evaluated while sustaining claims of effective crisis management. Combining neo-statecraft with insights from agnotology (organised production and management of 'not knowing'), the analysis demonstrates how evidentiary practices and restricted participation in decision-making reduced ministers' exposure to blame while shifting responsibility onto senior officials. Symbolic resilience provides a framework for understanding how crisis governance narrows evaluative criteria of policy success, thereby enabling governments seemingly to maintain effective control while welfare harms become institutionally marginalised within official policy evaluation.
Many parents in Canada rely on public family support programs during the early childhood period, including parental leave benefits, childcare subsidies, and the Canada Child Benefit. Parents who are undocumented, however, cannot access these social programs. Drawing on a policy review and interviews with undocumented mothers and service providers, this paper explores the impacts of welfare-state bordering - the legal and administrative barriers that prevent undocumented mothers from accessing family support programs. Participant experiences reveal how bordering contributes to family poverty and material hardship, and children's exclusion from early childhood education opportunities. Welfare-state bordering makes mothers dependent on others for their family's material survival, heightening mothers’ risk of exposure to gender-based violence and exploitation. Undocumented mothers’ experiences are analyzed through a feminist social reproduction lens to show how both their reproductive and productive labour is discounted within the current policy context. Findings highlight the need for policy changes to expand access to the Canada Child Benefit and childcare subsidies to uphold the human rights of undocumented mothers and their children.
This article examines how ambivalence shapes social policies for vulnerabilised populations, based on an analysis of support measures for migrant domestic workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland. Drawing on interviews with policymakers, civil society actors, and domestic workers, we identify three key dimensions of ambivalence: the conditionality of support, its short-term nature, and the risks and uncertainties entailed. We argue that this ambivalence is not unique to the pandemic but reflects a broader pattern of governance. In this way, the vulnerability of domestic workers is limited yet sustained, rendering them a reliable workforce within the domestic care sector. Our study contributes to an intersectional understanding of welfare governance, highlighting its growing entanglement with migration control and its role in reproducing, rather than reducing, social inequalities.
England today is embroiled in a housing crisis resulting from decades of policy choices that have eroded affordability. Simultaneously, political parties and popular media have constructed a so-called ‘migrant crisis’ based in the misplaced perception that increasing rates of migration have overburdened public budgets. Though often discussed separately, the housing crisis and the perceived crisis of migration are deeply intertwined outcomes of the same ideological, historical, and economic processes. In this article, we trace a critical history of English housing policy in light of contemporary anti-migrant narratives. Building on work from theorist Stuart Hall, who contended that moral panics around mugging in 1970s Britain served to distract from economic crisis and justify policing agendas, we argue that contemporary anti-migrant narratives have similarly taken root because of widespread economic anxiety in the face of strained public resources and escalating housing costs. We show how the scapegoat produced by contemporary migration panics is not only empirically unclear and conceptually oversimplistic but diverts attention away from longer-term political choices that have exposed large segments of the population to housing insecurity.
This article explores how low-resourced single mothers in Victoria, Australia, navigate work, care responsibilities and interactions with the social support system. Drawing on 20 in-depth, qualitative interviews with single mothers on the margins of the formal labour market, and informed by concepts from affect theory, this article demonstrates how government rhetoric has been internalised by participants, shaping their attachment to paid work as a pathway to a positive future. Simultaneously, participants described feeling let down by the lack of government support for, and recognition of, the care work they undertake in the present.
In January 2026, the UK government announced the establishment of the Crisis and Resilience Fund (CRF) that will come into force in April 2026 and replace the Household Support Fund. Ostensibly, the CRF aims to alleviate immediate hardship while moving individuals, families and households towards financial resilience. However, drawing on critical work on the ‘gritty citizen’ and on financialisation and resilience, I argue the CRF encapsulates a ‘resilience paradox’: those seeking help are expected to demonstrate self-sufficiency, yet are seeking help because of a lack of material security. This legitimizes interventions designed to increase people's ‘resilience’, conforming to the entrepreneurial, financialised, self. Taken in the context of enduring austerity localism, the further embedding of resilience thinking in English social policy sustains the ‘risk shift’ from collective risk pooling and the state on to individuals who are seldom able to shoulder such risk.
In the Australian child protection system, there is a growing emphasis on ‘culturally safe’ practices to better understand the cultural needs of racialised children and families. This article explores how ‘culture’ is represented in the NSW child protection system, drawing on an analysis of key policy documents. Using Carol Bacchi's ‘What's the problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR) approach, this article draws attention to how ‘culture’ is institutionalised through policy and how racialised children and families are governed through the population category ‘Culturally and Linguistically Diverse’ (‘CALD’). The article finds that ‘culture talk’ is exclusively produced for racialised children and families, and that ‘CALD’ as a population category becomes knowable through policy directives around a set of performative ‘cultural’ tasks. In addition, throughout the policies ‘culture’ is associated with interpersonal experiences of racism rather than institutional racism. It is argued that this problematisation reinforces Otherness and invisibilises institutional Whiteness and racism.
This article examines the Illustrated Dictionary of La Busqueda, a collaborative tool created through participatory workshops with three Mexican search collectives: families seeking disappeared loved ones. Drawing on feminist and decolonial methodologies, we trace how the Dictionary emerged from sustained dialogue between Tecnicas Rudas, an interdisciplinary feminist organisation, and relatives of Mexico's 130,000 + disappeared persons. Through writing exercises, collage, and ritual practices conducted in Morelos, Puebla, and Sinaloa, participants developed a metalanguage that names the embodied, affective, and material dimensions of searching. Our use of the word metalanguage comes from Tecnicas Rudas methodological design and points to something bigger than language itself, created by and for the collectives. We analyse how this counter-archive challenges official narratives that reduce disappearance to statistics, instead foregrounding families' epistemic authority. The Dictionary functions simultaneously as memory work, political intervention, and intergenerational toolkit, demonstrating how grassroots epistemologies can inform policy, pedagogy, and transnational solidarity movements. We reflect on the possibilities and limitations of arts-based methods in contexts of systemic violence whilst advocating for funding models that respect collective autonomy.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government introduced the 2021 Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) report as a flagship race policy. Using Critical Policy Analysis (CPA), this study critically examines the CRED report to uncover how structural racial inequality is obscured through policy discourse. The analysis reveals three key findings: (a) the report's reliance on data-driven and technocratic language depoliticises racism, framing disparities as cultural or behavioural rather than systemic; (b) key racial concepts are redefined, raising thresholds for recognising institutional racism and shifting accountability away from state structures; (c) by selectively highlighting minority 'success stories' and national progress, the policy constructs an optimistic narrative that reinforces state legitimacy. This research contributes to the literature by exposing how UK race policy functions as a tool of ideological containment, managing public dissent while preserving the racial order embedded within capitalist governance.
The concept of 'lived experience' has become increasingly important in activities such as campaigning, research, and policy design. Concurrently, and in slight contrast, 'framing approaches', have also become more popular. Whilst empirical work around emotions within social policy development remains limited, there have recently been a number of calls for compassion, kindness, and hope to form the basis of political and policy-related discussions. In this article, we explore the relatively simultaneous emergence and increasing profile of these three topics. We note tensions, contradictions, and generalisations within and between them, examining anti-poverty activities in the UK and the Talking about poverty (TaP) project between JRF and Frameworks as an exemplar. Drawing widely on literature relating to anger, we question the absence of this emotion in many of the stories of poverty and hardship presented by campaigners, researchers, and policymaking organisations.
Although there is not much attention for the concept of social suffering in studies on welfare policy and frontline work, it offers a valuable perspective for understanding both the harms that welfare clients endure and the ways in which state actors may either mitigate or compound this harm. Based on observations of 172 welfare encounters in the Netherlands, we contribute to the literature by empirically showing how welfare officials respond to the social suffering of clients. Officials most often misrecognized the social suffering of welfare clients by ignoring, reacting indifferently or individualizing it. Moments when they recognized it were more exceptional and took the form of empathising with the feelings of clients or acknowledging the social origin of their suffering. In the context of widespread distrust in institutions following governmental crises such as the Dutch Benefit Scandal, we believe it is important to invest more efforts in examining how and why frontline workers use their discretion to respond to people's social suffering.
In the UK, migrants with No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) conditions are denied full access to social security benefits and the labour market, rendering them 'invisible' and dependent on third sector organisations, like foodbanks. This qualitative study explored how third sector organisations used food aid to challenge the invisibilising of those with NRPF. In 2022, semi-structured interviews and focus groups were carried out with 17 organisations supporting migrant households across the UK; and with 13 London-based migrants with experience of NRPF status. Organisations such as foodbanks have the resources to intervene in the uncertainty and liminality that NRPF confers by providing material and temporal structure. However, providing crucial support to migrants inadvertently perpetuates the shadow welfare regime that has grown around the ever-expanding gaps in state provision. This paper highlights some of the ways that food aid organisations mitigate the harms of immigration regimes against the problematic backdrop of uncertainty and welfare failure.
This article traces the colonial making of First Nations poverty in Canada through a Foucauldian and settler-colonial lens. Centered on the Cree concept k-& ocirc;h-kitim & acirc;kisiyahk ("the reasons why we are poor"), it argues that reserves, Indian welfare policy, and the Indian Residential School system operated as intertwined regimes of enclosure, discipline, and biopolitical control over First Nation populations. Drawing on policy history, archival material, and personal narrative, I show how Foucauldian logics of surveillance, moral judgement, and conditional assistance were first applied to poor settlers and then reworked to govern First Nations as racialized wards of the state. A prairie case study of on-reserve welfare in Manitoba illustrates how rationing, agricultural schemes, and postwar "integration" reforms consolidated chronic underfunding, dependency, and jurisdictional conflict that persist in contemporary on-reserve income assistance. The article further examines social work's implication in these welfare regimes. I conclude that First Nations poverty is not a policy failure but a deliberately structured effect of settler colonial governance.
This study examines the erosion of social protection in post-1991 Ukraine, focusing on the impact of dismantling a city-forming enterprise that had upheld citizens' welfare since the 1960s. In the socialist era, enterprises were central to providing socioeconomic security, linking economic production directly with social policy. The post-Soviet industrial decline critically undermined the sustainability of social welfare, a process reinforced by Washington Consensus-inspired reforms that accelerated the dismantling of socialist institutions. Using archival research and semi-structured interviews, I investigate how these changes affected socioeconomic welfare in Central and Western Ukraine. Findings reveal a persistent demand among citizens for adequate social provisions. This study highlights how the collapse of socialist enterprises destabilized social security, illustrating the broader consequences of post-socialist economic and policy transformations for citizens' livelihoods.
Working at the interstices of critical social policy, sociology and social movement studies, this article contributes to understanding the social impact of anti-migrant mobilisation. Research on anti-migrant activism has focused to date on the sociography, action repertoire, discursive strategies and propensity for political violence of anti-migrant actors. This article considers its impact on those working in public and third sector roles supporting people arriving and/or managing community tensions. It explores the case of Dover and surrounding area as a focal point of anti-migrant activism due to the arrival of refugees via 'small boat crossings'. Employing a relational sociological approach, the article highlights the interactional dynamic between political discourse and policy designed to create a hostile immigration environment, the reaction-seeking tactics of anti-migrant activists and the responses of local authority, police and third sector actors delivering safeguarding and welfare services to those seeking asylum.
Human rights-based approaches to suicide have gained global traction after the United Nations' 2019 call for suicide prevention as an obligation of human rights. These approaches shift from viewing suicide as an individual problem to one rooted in socio-political conditions and societal injustice. In the UK, Scotland is notoriously progressive in its national suicide prevention strategies, championing human rights-based approaches that centre trauma-informed care, multi-sectoral engagement, and lived/living experience. The Scottish Government's Time Space Compassion approach is the country's most recent suicide response strategy. While Time Space Compassion maintains progressive intentions, normative and pathological assumptions permeate its representations of suicide and suicidality. This article utilises 'queering' as a methodological tool to challenge the approach's normalised ideals of suicidal time, space, and compassion and argue for a queering of the desire to die that mobilises structural change and capacitates more liveable futures.
