Anti-imperial autoethnographies of family separation:feminist solidarities against imperial bordering in the UK

Anti-imperial autoethnography is an important practice for critiquing and reflecting upon encounters with imperial bordering and its junctions with the neoliberal-corporate university. In this article, we analyse our children's visa rejections to the UK, where we work and study as immigrant academics. We argue that the Home Office's policy of what constitutes a child's “welfare” produces racialised, gendered, and classist processes through which children are legally estranged from their primary carer when they immigrate for work unaccompanied by the other parent. This heteropatriarchal policy disproportionately impacts working migrant mothers. Academic carers can be further impacted by corporate university practices that eschew institutional agency and responsibility, including by individualising interpretations of visa rejections or presuming to abstain wholesale from matters concerning migrant family welfare. We reflect on how transnational feminist friendships and solidarities challenge imperial bordering and the interfaces of border enforcement with academic institutions and spaces, and acknowledge the importance of ongoing activist work to abolish borders from within the university.