Between Care and Criminality: Marriage, Citizenship, and Family in Australian Social Welfare

Between Care and Criminality examines social welfare's encounter with migration and marriage in a period of intensified border control in Melbourne, Australia. It offers an in-depth ethnographic account of the effort to prevent forced marriage in the aftermath of a 2013 law that criminalized the practice. Disproportionately targeted toward Muslim migrant communities, prevention efforts were tasked with making the family relations and marital practices of migrants objects of policy knowledge in the name of care and community empowerment. Through tracing the everyday ways that direct service providers, police, and advocates learned to identify imminent marriages and at-risk individuals, this book reveals how the domain of social welfare becomes the new frontier where the settler colonial state judges good citizenship. In doing so, it invites social welfare to reflect on how migrant conceptions of familial care, personhood, and mutual obligation become structured by the violence of displacement, borders, and conditional citizenship.

Author: Helena Zeweri
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 12/15/2023
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.72lbs
ISBN13: 9781978829022
ISBN10: 1978829027
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Sociology | Marriage & Family
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | Australian & Oceanian Studies
- Social Science | Islamic Studies