Скачать или смотреть Borderlines Panel Discussion: Mothering Across Borders: Ayahs, Migration, and Racialised Care

Borderlines is thrilled to host Mothering Across Borders: Ayahs, Migration, and Racialised Care.


Panel Description
This panel explores how migrant women’s motherhood has been shaped, represented, and regulated across different historical and political contexts, from colonial ayahs employed in British imperial households to Turkish and Kurdish migrant mothers in contemporary London. Bringing these two contexts into dialogue reveals enduring patterns of racialised care work, maternal surveillance, and moral judgement imposed on minoritised women.
The discussion examines how ayahs were positioned as both essential and expendable within colonial family life, and how migrant mothers today are similarly scrutinised through welfare, education, and immigration regimes. At the same time, the panel highlights women’s everyday strategies of resistance, care, and survival, including transnational mothering, the creation of collective women’s spaces and child-rearing networks, the establishment of nurseries, and advocacy within racialised institutions. By tracing these connected histories, the panel invites reflection on how empire, migration, race, and gender continue to shape whose motherhood is valued, suspected, or celebrated in Britain today.

Speakers
Dr. Feride Kumbasar
Dr Feride Kumbasar is a Borderlines Resident Fellow, feminist migration scholar and community researcher whose work bridges academia, activism, and creative practice. She completed her TECHNE- and AHRC funded PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Roehampton (2024), titled Migrant Women Negotiating Border, Work, and Space: Turkish and Kurdish Women in Hackney, 1980–2018. Her research investigates the intersections of migration, gender, labour, and urban change, using participatory and decolonial methodologies such as oral history, go along interviews, and community mapping. Feride’s forthcoming monograph, under provisional acceptance for Manchester University Press’s Women on the Move series, develops this research further to examine counter cartographies of migrant women’s agency. Alongside her academic work, she has held leadership roles in women’s and refugee organisations and curated the exhibition Hidden Voices: The Making of Hackney (2022). Her work foregrounds collaborative knowledge production and feminist approaches to belonging, care, and spatial justice.

Diana Caine
Diana Caine is a former consultant neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst whose earlier research used psychoanalytic theory to rethink the implications of neurological damage for human subjectivity. Her current work turns this lens toward coloniality, focusing on settler-colonial infants and the women, enslaved or indentured, who cared for them. Her article “Apartheid’s Paradox: Impossible Borders, Unspeakable Intimacies” appeared in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2023). A version of this work will appear in her forthcoming book, Mothering in the Colonies (Routledge, 2026).

Taryn Khanam
Taryn Khanam BEM is the CEO of BritBangl, a forum for British Bengali professionals who are proud of their culture and heritage. She worked on the Bengali Britain and Muslims at Sea Exhibition and East India Company Monuments at St Paul's Cathedral. Taryn is a Trustee of the Muslin Trust, a London-based nonprofit founded to preserve, promote and revive Bangladeshi heritage fabrics. Taryn received the British Community Honours Award for her outstanding contribution to the welfare and integration of minority communities into mainstream British Society. She also received Queen’s Honours for her services to diversity in Government and the Bengali community.


Panel Chair
Dr Leslie James
Dr Leslie James is a Senior Lecturer in Global History in the School of Society and Environment at Queen Mary University of London, where she joined in 2017. Prior to this, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham and a Lecturer in World History at the University of Cambridge. Her research examines the political and intellectual history of Africa and the African diaspora, with particular attention to Black radical thought and the global and local dimensions of anti-colonial movements in the twentieth century. Her research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, CRASSH (University of Cambridge), and the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies (Yale). She has also hosted a British Academy Visiting Fellowship with Dr Monsuru Muritala (University of Ibadan) and is a member of the AHRC-funded Afro-Asian Research Networks Collective.


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