Paper Short Abstract:

To grasp the specific temporalities of migrant mothers’ experiences in council estate neighbourhoods, I coin an ethnographic concept: arrival. It conflates their past trajectories through welfare services with how everyday experiences of being a mother are shaped by reputation in the public space.

Paper Abstract:

My proposal focuses on migrant mothers’ experiences examined from the public space within the neighbourhood. Drawing on a long-term ethnography in a Parisian council estate, I have observed how mothers evolve in their everyday lives with a view of elaborating strategies to mobilize parenting resources. Their interactions with social services revolve around moralities crossing two dimensions of reproductive labour: respectability --defined by Marylin Strathern as the external face of internal morality-- and community engagement, which entails that mothers “come out of their home”, leading to a continuum of involvements ranging from plain neighbourhood sociabilities up to more committed volunteering. Allowing comprehension of how and why some embody the mothering figures valued, the ethnography has unveiled the overlapping of the “arrival” in the neighbourhood (access to the council estate) and migrant mothers’ self-presentations around how they speak of themselves and their pasts. On one side, married women have arrived in France through family reunification and swiftly obtained social rights; on the other side, lone mothers have arrived illegally and experienced precarity and homelessness before having access to “private life” through the council estate. The concept « shapes of the arrival" enables me to grasp the structural temporalities of women migration and the ethnographic temporalities of mothers’ everyday experiences, including both parenting and affective citizenship, within the public space.