Hostile environments: Mould, race and blame amidst Birmingham's housing crisis

The UK Government Home Office's ‘hostile environment’ policy is aimed at making it difficult for migrants to stay in Britain. This approach has combined securitised practices of bordering and policing, with policies which have hollowed out state provisioning at community level. The purpose of this research was to understand how the hostile environment is experienced in the lives and bodies of Somali families who inhabit temporary or precarious accommodation in Birmingham. We conducted biographic interviews that focused on experiences of multiple forms of housing, creative workshops with more than 50 Somali women, and interviews with nodal figures within the housing ecology. We found that Somali families who have been unhomed live in overcrowded, private and temporary accommodations of varying states of disrepair, mould and damp. When these houses begin to make them sick, blame is apportioned by state officials to their quotidian acts of care and homemaking such that they encounter mould as a form of corporeal punishment for seeking state resources. We conclude by arguing that mould acts as a material and metaphor that brings attention to forms of racialised blame caused by hostile environment and housing policies. We show how the subjects of such policies mobilise their bodies as sites of evidence to ‘hail’ the state.