Migrant parents talking back – Stigmatised identities and doing being ordinary

Abstract

This article explores how migrant parents resist racist and stigmatising stereotypes about their parenthood. The analysis examines the parents’ ways of ‘talking back’ to racialised categories and category predicates, which position migrant parents as unfit. Family relationships are crucial to decisions of when, where and with whom to move as well as how to live in the new country. The ways in which parents are met in family services, such as maternity healthcare, daycare and schools, influence their sense of belonging. Nonetheless, parents also use their agency to negotiate their identities by talking back to negative categorisations of them as unfit parents. The data of the study consist of individual and group interviews with migrant parents in five different cities in Finland. Altogether, 24 parents took part in interviews. The method of the study is membership categorisation analysis, which focuses on cultural structures that are produced and maintained in everyday life. As a result of the analysis, two ways of talking back were identified: first, migrant parents disengage from the negative category predicates, which assume them as abusive towards their children. Second, the parents stress their normalcy by addressing that their life situations, gendered family roles and parenting goals are similar in all families. We also found that migrant parents are often perceived as a unified group in dominant cultural discourses and even welfare services, and this perception can result in structural racism.

Parental care in trajectories of forced migration: Ruptures and changing conditions for family life

“…Furthermore, a document analysis inspired by Foucault's work on social warfare unfolds how immigrant parenthood became a problem of ambiguous welfare governing by untangling the shifting problematizations shaped by general political challenges, such as labour market politics in 1970s, low school performance in 1990s and anti-terror measures intersecting with racialization of immigrant families in the 2010s (Padovan-Özdemir & Moldenhawer, 2017). This tendency is also reflected in a Finish and a Canadian study, that both show how the encounters between immigrant parents and welfare services are shaped by stereotypical expectations and stigmatizing understandings of racialized parenthood that position parents as unfit (Dumbrill, 2009;Turtiainen & Hiitola, 2019). When trauma, skills and ethnicity operate as 'regimes of truth' (Fennig & Denov, 2019) social-political conditions and the agency of parents risk being pushed out of the equation in social workers understanding of parents with refugee experience.…”