Mothering urban space, governing migrant women: the construction of intersectional positions in area-based interventions in Berlin

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate new ways of governing migrant populations in Germany brought forth by social policies on the local level of inner-city neighborhoods. In recent years, numerous initiatives on the local level have constituted the ‘migrant neighborhood’ as a site of governmental attention. One initiative that policymakers consider particularly innovative is the neighborhood mothers program in Berlin, a program that instructs migrant women as agents of neighborhood improvement and encourages them to establish peer-to-peer relations to other migrant women in order to pass on social norms. In the paper, we combine governmentality and intersectionality theory to critically examine the modes of behavior change promoted by the neighborhood mothers program and the political rationalities that are used to justify the governing of (and through) migrant women. We draw particular attention to the spatial dimensions of the neighborhood mothers program, to the ways in which it targets domestic and intimate spaces as sites of inspection and intervention and appoints migrant women as ‘door openers’ for entry of the state into the regulation of families and communities.