‘I feel sometimes I am a bad mother’: The affective dimension of immigrant mothers’ involvement in their children’s schooling

Abstract

This article identifies the complex emotional dimensions of migrant mothers' involvement in their children's education, building on feminist scholarship which affirms the importance of their emotional labour. We present findings from a study of Muslim Iraqi mothers with schoolaged children in Australia, based on 47 interviews with 25 immigrant mothers. Drawing on a Bourdieusian conceptual framework, we argue that the reserves of cultural and emotional capital required for effective participation in children's education can be both consolidated and diminished through the process of migration. Perceived ineffective involvement comes at heavy emotional price, threatening some women's perceptions of themselves as 'good mothers'.

Emotion labor and affect in transnational encounters: Insights from Western-trained TESOL professionals in Saudi Arabia

“…Emotion and affect are interdisciplinary, complex, and contested concepts, bearing multiple theoretical underpinnings and conceptual foundations within and across disciplines (Ahmed, 2004; Al-deen and Windle, 2016; Benesch, 2019, 2020; Bigelow, 2019; Prior, 2019; Wetherell, 2015). Scholars in applied linguistics and language education, for the past decade, have been raising concerns about the lack of scholarly attention to emotion and affect as well as the under-theorization of these constructs, and have thus called for an “affective turn” (see Prior, 2019: 516 for more details).…”

“…Benesch’s critiques of emotional in emotional labor appear to be a little at odds with Al-deen and Windle (2016), who affirm the importance of emotional labor in their study on Muslim Iraqi immigrant mothers’ involvement with their children’s education in Australia. Firmly located in a Bourdieusian framework of capital and in the emerging scholarship on emotional capital, Al-deen and Windle show “how emotional labor is situated differently in relation to cultural, institutional and market hierarchies for a particular group of mothers who have moved between social fields through the process of migration” (2016: 2). Importantly, they indicate these mothers all see their emotional labor as a domestic and moral responsibility concerning their involvement in their children’s education.…”

“…Nevertheless, whether or not their emotional labor is recognized as capital depends on the relationships between emotional capital and other forms of capital that these mothers possess, accumulate, display, and reflect on. By analyzing these mothers’ emotional labor in relation to emotional capital and discourses on motherhood, neoliberalism, and Islam and Muslims, Al-deen and Windle (2016) point to the complex nature of emotional labor, showing a wide range of emotions expressed, enacted, adopted, and cultivated by their female participants in transnational space. Importantly, their focus on emotional labor does not suggest that labor is emotional but, instead, solidifies the need to engage critically with a range of emotions in the context of transnational migration and neoliberalism.…”

“…Seeing ideology and power as “lived and felt” does not reject the metaphysics and metanarratives of contexts and meaning making, while making prominent “a politics of the self” that anchors in the self’s complex and dynamic social, inter-personal, and inter-individual multiplicities, moments, experiences, encounters, responses, and articulations (Phan and Bao, 2019: 241). Through emphases on the social inter-individual and its multifaceted dialogues with others and with its immediate and far-out contexts as the authors reflect on their personal and professional experiences with English, Phan and Bao (2019) share some common grounds with and complement Ahmed’s (2004) cultural politics of emotion, Benesch’s (2019, 2020) theorization of emotion and emotion labor, Al-deen and Windle’s (2016) discussion of emotional labor and emotional capital, and Wetherell’s (2015) affective practice framework. We use emotion(al) labor throughout the article to signify the complex intertwined-ness explained above.…”

“…Here, emotional capital and emotion(al) labor were displayed and expressed in the conduct of care and responsibility (Al-deen and Windle, 2016), under the self-awareness of doubt and vulnerability, and with certain feelings and affects from within the teachers (Phan and Bao, 2019; Wetherell, 2015).…”