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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the experiences of a group of activist mothers with a migratory background living in Sweden. It explores how collective practices reshape their role as mothers, women and migrants, and allow them to imagine and form better futures for their local and diasporic networks.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses mothering practices of women from the Horn of Africa living in the multiethnic low-income neighbourhood of Rinkeby, Stockholm. While Rinkeby feels like a welcoming and safe home to many of its inhabitants, it has become synonymous with youth crime, violence and rioting in the wider Swedish public space. Every weekend, at night, the so-called “Mothers of Rinkeby” patrols the streets of the neighbourhood to dissuade those acts of violence that have marked the recent history of the neighbourhood. Based on an ethnography carried out in 2018, this paper argues that this social practice reshapes the activists’ roles as mothers, women and migrants by acting on their private and public, and individual and collective selves. On the one hand, patrolling helps women to acquire a new public agency with respect to gender-related roles attributed to them both within their diasporic networks and in the Swedish context (the stereotypical imaginary of Black and Muslim women as passive which often limits their spaces of action to the intimate sphere of family life). On the other hand, patrolling allows them to challenge the negative representations of Rinkeby and become key actors in these attempts to reduce the stigma attributed to the neighbourhood and its inhabitants. By mothering not only their own children but their wider youth community, the “Mothers of Rinkeby” seek to imagine and shape alternative and better futures for their neighbourhood and for their respective diasporic groups.