The coronavirus pandemic forced local support services in marginalised communities to adapt how they operated at the same time as demand for assistance soared. Social distancing restrictions brought into sharp relief the infrastructural dimensions of social care and support services and networks that are often backgrounded in day-to-day practice. A shadow care infrastructures lens looks purposively at care infrastructures that are not readily seen or acknowledged in dominant welfare discourse and research (Power, Wiesel, Mitchell, & Mee, 2022). Taking this analytic lens as our starting point, in this paper we explore how relations of care were reconfigured by the shift to remote care delivery during Covid-19 lockdowns and beyond. The challenges of providing care during lockdown reveal the complex interplay between distance and proximity in care relations and practices and the possibilities for doing care differently. The paper draws primarily on in-depth interviews with paid and voluntary supporters across a diverse range of care organisations servicing two Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Central Western Sydney. A gateway region for new migrants west of the population centre of Sydney, it was one of the areas worst affected by the outbreak of the Delta variant of Covid19 in 2021. The paper reflects on the potential longevity of pandemic care practices as cities learn to live with Covid.

This article draws on two surveys of international students in Sydney and Melbourne, undertaken in 2019 and during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns. Using the concept of bounded agency, we identify how the challenges of living in one of the world's most expensive rental housing markets impact students' perceptions of their academic attainment. We find housing insecurity, unaffordability and condition, amplified by financial stress, contribute significantly to student anxiety about their studies. These relationships differ by student background and education. We argue students' agency to meet their educational ambitions in Australia is constrained by the cost of housing and the housing choices they consequently make to mitigate financial stress. Our findings suggest the importance of 'town' or non-institutional aspects of the international student experience on their satisfaction and academic outcomes. We call for further research to explore these relationships in other global contexts.

Chapter 6 looks closely at the stories of two individuals in very different circumstances, but both afflicted with a deep sense of shame about relying on the Australian government for protection. Hasan was in limbo while he waited for the outcome of a review of his asylum case. Monica was a single parent and long-term welfare user who struggled to reconcile her aspirations and her circumstances. Through Hasan and Monica’s stories, this chapter pays attention to the productive and destructive dimensions of shame and disentangles the different capacities it makes possible or undermines. Asserting the power of personal choice as a vehicle for change and the sacrifice of personal dignity for the survival of the family is an anguished strategy of self-preservation when the prospects of one’s family look bleak and uncertain.

Chapter 3 looks at the different versions of reciprocity that interviewees drew on to frame and justify their expectations of social support. During interviews, welfare users invoked various forms of reciprocity in their talk about welfare[, from contributing to collective benefit to mutual investment between individuals In doing so, they expressed different forms of belonging to the nation and made claims on its resources. The responses of the small but diverse range of interviewees suggest more about dynamics than patterns of expectation. The chapter shows how familiar scripts are loaded with the details of personal biography and social circumstance. It concludes by drawing on Ghassan Hage’s concept of the ‘social gift’ to argue that attention to the mode of accessing rights helps understand the problem of inequality and discrimination for those who are formally, although sometimes only partially, included.

There is mounting evidence of increased international student financial and work precarity over the last decade in Australia. Yet, there has been a little scholarly analysis of which students are most affected by precarity and its sources. Drawing on two surveys of international students in Australia's two largest cities, conducted before and during the pandemic, we investigate the financial and work vulnerabilities of international students. We demonstrate that vulnerability is related to characteristics which describe particular cohorts of students: being from low-income countries, working class families, seeking a low-level qualification, enrolled in a non-university institution, and being without a scholarship. The concepts of "noncitizenship" and "work precarity" are used to explain how the mechanisms of each characteristic heighten vulnerability, thereby contributing to a broader evidence-base about the causality of international student precarity.

Chapter 2 provides the big picture backdrop for the rest of the book by placing Australia’s welfare system in international and historical context. It gives an overview of the resurgence and rise of more meagre and punitive welfare in Australia and the targeting of sanctions and supports at the most vulnerable welfare users with ‘complex needs’. While moral distinctions between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor have returned to prominence over the last three decades, they are deeply rooted in the foundations of the Australian welfare state. The chapter briefly outlines the history of exclusions and ‘conditional inclusion’ embedded in welfare provision, and how the settler-colonial welfare state dealt with Indigenous and non-white immigrant difference. The chapter concludes by situating Australian developments in relation to similar shifts in the UK, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada.

Chapter 4 continues the focus on reciprocity and welfare access. It foregrounds interviews and observations with frontline practitioners in community welfare organisations. It shows how ideas about positive and negative access inform judgements about the initiative of welfare users as a sign of empowered responsibility or dependent opportunism. The chapter refers to Michael Lipsky, Andrew Sayer and Tess Lea to flesh out ‘judgement’ as an emotional and bodily practice and to account for the resonance of certain scripts of access – such as ‘deserving vulnerability’ and ‘empowered responsibility’ – with frontline workers. The chapter argues that gratitude is the point where the problems of access and of cultural difference appear to intersect. Some cultural styles and demeanours become marked as arrogant and expectant and others as humble and receptive.

Chapter 7 draws attention to the modest pursuits and pleasures that sustain a liveable life in hardship but don’t necessarily conform to popular ideas of ‘good resilience’. It argues that research on lived experiences of welfare tends to be reactive in orientation, so that welfare users are more often positioned as adept responders than pursuers in accounts of getting by. The chapter builds on the work of Les Back and Eve Tuck to foreground examples of hope amid the strain of life on welfare without falling into overly rosy accounts of resilience or reinforcing the expectation that people face difficult situations with plucky resolve. While the understated examples of everyday care and accomplishment the chapter foregrounds may seem inconsequential, they are perhaps all the more relevant given the limited resources at the disposal of people struggling to get by.

International students have emerged as a major cohort within Australia's post-secondary education sector. Despite contributing substantially to the economy and community, they are expected to make their own way in Australia's expensive private rental market. Drawing on two surveys-one conducted prior to Covid-19 and one fielded during the pandemic-as well as forty semi-structured in-depth interviews, the article examines strategies adopted by students to cope with high rents in Sydney and Melbourne. Drawing on the concept of risk, we argue that international students studying in these two cities must constantly manage the pressures of expensive and unstable rental housing. Access to decent accommodation often depends on finding and maintaining paid employment. Second, students adopt risky strategies to meet housing costs such as sharing bedrooms. These strategies reduce rents but invoke further challenges. Third, we find that due to the loss of paid employment, the Covid-19 pandemic has substantially increased the risks for international students dependent on the private rental sector.

International students are an important global cohort of ‘noncitizens’ whose experiences are central concerns for urban sociologists and migration scholars. Drawing on survey fieldwork conducted among international students in the private rental sector in Sydney and Melbourne during 2019, this article provides new knowledge about the hardships experienced by international students who report financial stress. Using a modified scale developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we highlight the accelerating role of high levels of financial stress in producing disruptive events such as housing evictions and fears of homelessness, as well as reliance on inadequate housing like ‘hot-bedding’. Financial stress is significantly more likely for students from low-GNI (gross national income) countries and higher stress reduces wellbeing. Access to paid employment, however, does not ‘protect’ against higher financial stress. We conclude that higher education policymakers need tools and policies to prevent disruptive life events among international students related to financial stress, particularly those associated with housing.

Research documenting lived experiences of welfare rarely pays sustained attention to the multicultural realities that welfare users occupy. This book brings together Anglo-settler, Indigenous and minority ethnic stories of navigating the practical hurdles and cultural assumptions of Australia’s welfare system. It argues for more sustained attention to culturally diverse lives on welfare without reifying cultural difference or reducing people to the category of ‘welfare recipient’. The book is based on ethnographic research in southwest Sydney, a region popularly known as one of the most multicultural in Australia and targeted as a ‘disadvantaged area’ in place-based conditional welfare trials. The aim of foregrounding diverse and multifaceted accounts of welfare is informed by the author’s own experience of growing up in a poor, white family reliant on welfare. The book takes ‘responsibility’ and ‘vulnerability’ as starting points to explore how dominant cultural scripts about need and support interact with the diverse versions of obligation that make up everyday life. The book problematises how welfare policy moralises the actions, life chances and choices of people receiving government income support. At the same time, it shows the multiple cultural resources welfare users draw on to position themselves as moral subjects in strained circumstances.

Chapter 5 foregrounds the experiences of the most marginal welfare claimants in the study. It builds on Kathleen Miller’s concept of ‘everyday emergencies’ to show how everyday disruptions and obstacles unsettle yet settle into daily life in poverty. The chapter also builds on Mark Peel’s concept of ‘performing poverty’ and Kate Brown’s concept of ‘performing vulnerability’ to argue that welfare users are often required to reperform vulnerability for the welfare system. Individuals on both sides of the welfare frontline may be aware of the performative aspects of describing hardship, but performing does not equal pretending. The chapter shows how the compulsion to perform vulnerability shapes welfare users’ encounters with welfare agencies even if it does not determine the outcome of those encounters. Some seeking support choose to remove themselves from the welfare rolls rather than make themselves repeatedly vulnerable to the audience of experts.

The Conclusion reiterates the value of bringing together Anglo-settler, Indigenous and minority ethnic stories of life on welfare and the strengths and limits of ethnography in this endeavour. It foregrounds participants’ insights about the need for more understanding in Australia’s welfare system, particularly in the form of centring welfare users’ knowledge of the system. However, it also draws together lessons from the preceding chapters on practitioner ambivalence about welfare users’ knowledge and the limits of a system based on repeated disclosure, even when geared towards support. Finally, it returns to Ghassan Hage’s concept of the social gift to argue for a magnamanous rather than maligning spirit of welfare provision. In the face of mounting evidence that mean welfare exacerbates and entrenches the poverty and vulnerability it claims to tackle, the book ends by advocating a welfare system that creates possibilities rather than problems for the people who rely on it.

The Introduction situates the book’s aim of foregrounding culturally diverse accounts of welfare in relation to living social policy and moving social policy. It sets up the approach of the book as informed by ethnrographic attention to depth and complexity and the author’s first-hand perspective of an improverished life on welfare. This approach is attuned to the messiness and vivacity of lived lives and the uneven places and provisions of welfare within a fragmented welfare landscape. The introduction traces the movement of welfare policy and politics across the life of the research from PhD project to book. It shows how dominant policy ideas of vulnerability and resonsbility have remained current even as the meanings of those ideas have shifted across time and place.

The narrowing eligibility and increasing conditionality of social security payments in Anglophone liberal democracies like Australia has been accompanied by growing attention to the ways benefit recipients navigate the personal and practical challenges of life amid welfare reforms. This article reorients the study of getting by on welfare benefits to focus on the material and affective investment in making life liveable. I argue that the generative dimension of getting by is suggested but submerged within the reactive orientation of much welfare scholarship on coping and resilience. This article takes up the challenge of telling sociological stories of hope in hardship without romanticising everyday struggle. It does so by focusing on the pleasures, pursuits and projects – however modest and muted – that sustain a liveable life in hardship but do not necessarily conform to normative ideas of ‘good resilience’.

Housing is a major concern for many international students. This is especially so in those countries where students are mostly dependent on the private market for their accommodation. Australia is one such country, and is one of the world’s major destinations for international students. This article analyses governmental failure to address problems relating to international student housing affordability and conditions. Using theory on ‘policy inaction’ to frame the analysis, we draw on 20 interviews with policy stakeholders to explain the Australian government’s reliance on: (1) market-based housing provision for international students, and (2) a longstanding policy preference not to provide support. Interviewees were widely critical of the lack of action to address international student housing problems and understood inaction in relation, rather than in opposition, to the dominance of market-based action in housing and higher education. However, analysis of stakeholder perspectives also illuminates how policy-making action benefiting some emerges as inaction for others left behind or overlooked by the status quo. The interview data points to the need for government to overhaul its policy framework, and in doing so, to collaborate with higher education providers in revising the market-based regulatory approach. The main implications for theory and policy are discussed.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and the author's own experience, this book explores how diverse welfare users navigate the personal and practical hurdles of Australia's social security system.

In its response to COVID-19 in 2020, the Australian Government excluded international students from the temporary financial assistance it offered most permanent residents. This article examines the status of international student welfare as a policy question before and during the pandemic, and discusses post-pandemic policy implications. It draws on pre- and during-COVID-19 survey data from international students in Sydney and Melbourne. We argue that the pandemic highlighted and exacerbated an existing policy absence, rather than constituting a fresh abandonment of international students. Since the Dawkins changes in the early 1990s, international students have been officially treated in policy as consumers, not as 'social citizens'. This made many of them vulnerable to socio-economic shocks, given widespread dependence on precarious employment and insecure private income sources. The central policy implication is that, to avoid disproportionate welfare diminutions in future crises, the government needs to align the treatment of international and domestic students.