Circuiting parents’ voice: Parenting discussion groups and institutional healing in northeast Paris

Abstract

The discussion group is a common form of parenting support offered by associations in the pluri-ethnic, working-class neighborhoods of northeast Paris. Situated in a larger formation of voice that hails marginalized parents to speak, professionals engage with these discussion groups as potential social ‘transistors’: simultaneously circuiting parents’ voice inwards to restore parents’ agentive capacities and amplifying it outwards into an audible collective voice aimed at impacting state–citizen relations. In order to reach this double effect, professionals deploy ‘paralinguistic techniques’, which produce and combine intimate and civic, normative and alternative (semi-)public speech contexts. As a result, discussion groups emerge as pedagogical instances of a ‘Republican’ public sphere and its reworkings. Against the backdrop of anxieties of a disintegrating Republic and failing institutions, discussion groups highlight a desire for new conduits of citizenship, as well as the ways in which marginalized residents are called upon to invest these with their voice.

Experiments in Empowerment: Research as Clearing

“…The local community organizers and neighborhood officials with whom Anick worked infused their work with a critical understanding of the effect on working-class and migrant parents' sense of self of institutions' hierarchical, normative, and often discriminatory posture towards them. The collective activities offered by community centers were precisely meant as spaces where parents' capacities would be 'valorized', and where they could regain self-esteem and a sense of agency (see also Vollebergh 2022). From 2015 onwards, several community centers also started to offer workshops for parents on a specific parenting method, namely the classic 1970s American self-help method 'How2talk2kids'.…”

Intimate States

“…The idea that the republic has lost its hold over the territory and fails to create a cohesive citizenry has been projected in particular onto the multiethnic banlieues (Chabal 2015;Dikeç 2011), sparking a broad set of policy interventions that seek to promote "participation" and modernize government, including by leaning more heavily on the work of local associations (Nicholls 2006;Tissot 2005). The provision of collective, empowering forms of parenting support by associations in Paris is thus part of a broader policy effort to relate to (migrantbackground) neighborhood residents in new ways in order to reconnect them more positively and securely to institutions and the state (Tissot 2007;Vollebergh 2020a).…”

Introduction Special Issue “Paradoxical orders: Parenting encounters, the welfare state, and difference in Europe”

“…The professionals in our studies have to work through such heterogeneous assemblages to achieve the particular public goods promised by their program or service (Bear and Mathur, 2015). Some of them also understand their parenting interventions as a way to achieve even bigger goals: regenerating the social fabric through relationality (Marchesi, 2022) or improving the working of Republican institutions (Vollebergh, 2022).…”

“…Public discourses that outline the nation by explicitly naming its others in ethnic, religious or racialized terms are indeed prevalent in many of the sites that appear in this special issue: Amsterdam (De Koning and Ruijtenberg, 2022), Aarhus (Johansen, 2022) and Milan (Marchesi, 2022). In Paris (Vollebergh, 2022), where the Republican project does not allow for such upfront articulations of difference, policies instead use spatial nomers like “sensitive urban areas” to designate risky subjects and problem areas (Van Breugel and Scholten, 2017).…”

“…Such “universal” approaches are punctuated by sings of unassimilable, troubling otherness. This may be in the form of recurring tropes like smacking in the Amsterdam case (De Koning and Ruijtenberg, 2022), delinquency in the Aarhus case (Johansen, 2022), or the so-called communautarist identifications and socialities in Paris (Vollebergh, 2022). Such tropes function as icons of troublesome difference in these contexts.…”