Pushing the borders of social policy analysis

In this conversation the joint winners of the 2023 British Academy Peter Townsend Book Prize discuss their books with Mary Daly. The prize is awarded biennially for outstanding work in social policy. Lydia Morris, author of The Moral Economy of Welfare and Migration and Fiona Williams, author of Social Policy: a Critical and Intersectional Analysis, discuss their analyses of social change and social welfare since the start of austerity in 2010. Both authors highlight the ways in which the increasingly restrictive, controlling and punitive policies of migration and asylum at the borders have been carried into domestic welfare policy. Both focus on the immiserating impact on specific populations and the connections to ethnonationalist discourses. For Morris, employing the concept of civic stratification, this ‘welfare/asylum/migration nexus’ is part of a moral economy whose devices of control have far reaching implications for how we are governed as a total population. Williams contextualises these developments in terms of four intersecting global crises: the racialised crisis of borders and the crises of care, of climate change, and of financial capitalism. Both authors consider the forms and influence of social justice resistance.