On the Importance of Playing House: Belonging Work and the Making of Relational Citizens in Finnish Immigrant Integration Policies

In: Politics & policy, Band 49, Heft 4, S. 842-865

Abstract

As participatory immigrant integration policies proliferate in Europe, it has become urgent to analyze the dynamics of citizenship these policies produce. This article forges the notion of belonging‐work to explore the practices that frontline social workers use to manage relations between immigrant women and their native neighbors. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Helsinki, Finland, the article accounts for belonging as a socially situated phenomenon—as an interactive process that takes place in concrete institutional settings. It attracts attention to the domestic mode of belonging toward which welfare professionals channel immigrant women's local participation by constructing collective identities as local mothers, cultivating extended practices of care, and orchestrating feelings of "hominess" between the mobilized women. A pragmatic solution to preventing social isolation in inactive migrant women, participatory integration measures—if practiced alone—appear to hold weak potential for producing equal citizenship.Related Articles in this Special IssueBarrault‐Stella, Lorenzo, and Thomas Douniès. 2021a. "From Good 'User' to Good Citizen? The Political Effects on Families of Education Policies in France." Politics & Policy 49 (4).Barrault‐Stella, Lorenzo, and Thomas Douniès. 2021b. "Introduction to the Special Issue: Citizenship as a Tool of Government in Europe." Politics & Policy 49 (4).Ewert, Benjamin. 2021. "Citizenship as a Form of Anticipatory Obedience? Implications of Preventive Health Policy in Germany." Politics & Policy 49 (4).