Institutionalised resistance and everyday bordering

The processes and practices that comprise the UK’s border regime are increasingly dispersed and complex. Immigration checks have become embedded in many aspects of everyday life and are being administered by residents vis-à-vis their fellow residents, rather than state border officials. This shift has rendered public institutions, such as hospitals and universities, as key sites within the UK’s internal borderscape. Public sector workers are tasked with undertaking borderwork on behalf of the state to determine residents’ access to a wide range of services. This rise of everyday bordering has met with resistance. However, the dispersal of bordering practices and their embedding within the administration systems of public institutions present contextual challenges to those that would oppose them. In this chapter, I analyse how institutional contexts in two parts of the UK’s public sector - higher education and healthcare - shape both processes of building solidarity (or solidarisation) and the forms of resistance itself.