As participatory immigrant integration policies proliferate in Europe, it has become urgent to analyze the dynamics of citizenship these policies produce. This article forges the notion of belonging-work to explore the practices that frontline social workers use to manage relations between immigrant women and their native neighbors. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Helsinki, Finland, the article accounts for belonging as a socially situated phenomenon—as an interactive process that takes place in concrete institutional settings. It attracts attention to the domestic mode of belonging toward which welfare professionals channel immigrant women’s local participation by constructing collective identities as local mothers, cultivating extended practices of care, and orchestrating feelings of “hominess” between the mobilized women. A pragmatic solution to preventing social isolation in inactive migrant women, participatory integration measures—if practiced alone—appear to hold weak potential for producing equal citizenship.
Page de référence : https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/polp.12420