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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the binary of active vs. passive parenting functioned as a bureaucratic and moral category in a Berlin "intercultural" welfare center, and how, through everyday ethical encounters with a welfare professional, it produced conditional belonging and withdrawal among mothers.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the bureaucratic binary of “active” versus “passive” parents functioned as a category of moral and administrative classification in a Berlin “intercultural” parent-child center. Although the center was formally a voluntary space of leisure and play, its director faced pressure to align activities with municipal integration goals and funding expectations. Highlighting her role as a bureaucratic actor, she promoted the social work paradigm of parent activation (Elternaktivierung), interpreted as visible civic participation and one-on-one parenting engagement. A directive to “actively play” with children, a sign-up sheet to run a coffee counter, and spatial restrictions that excluded “inactive” parents from shared areas all worked to differentiate families into moral types and posited some families as obstructive to the center’s aim. A tight-knit group of Palestinian-German mothers resisted being classified as passive parents, and insisted on the value of informal sociality and a relational ethic of care. Yet, the moral weight of the director’s judgments shaped how they came to experience the center, and the activation policy resulted in a sense of conditional belonging and withdrawal. I analyze how bureaucratic categorization works through situated moral evaluations, where people are judged, approved of, or dismissed, and their sense of personhood and recognition is at stake. The paper argues that the social life of activation categories is inseparable from perceived moral authority and recognition.