‘When my children were born, I started to love Belgium’: Moroccan migrant mothers’ narratives of affective citizenship in the Belgian citizenisation context

ABSTRACT

Integration policies and citizenisation programmes tend to have narrow conceptions of ‘good’ citizenship and are often articulated alongside specific assumptions regarding different migrant groups. This study draws on the qualitative research of a unique citizenisation pilot programme in Flanders, Belgium. The programme offered the combination of language courses, citizenisation and education support, and specifically targeted low literate migrant mothers from a non-EU background. Our analysis reveals the discrepancies between dominant discourses about integration and citizenisation and the participants’ own views and experiences. We found that the government-subsidised local programme primarily focused on the mothers’ citizenship in terms of linguistic and cultural integration, while the women themselves mostly endorsed an affective citizenship as mothers, wives and community members, by centralising mothering and care work. Furthermore, the programme oscillated between paternalism and support, visible in discourses of ‘need’ and ‘empowerment’. And finally, the mothers’ agency to navigate between the programme’s objectives and their own were dependent on their intersectional positionings; the more literate and the longer their residence in the host society, the more critical they were regarding the programme’s agenda. Based on these findings, some empirically obtained directives for future citizenisation programmes are suggested.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant mothers
• care work
• affective citizenship
• citizenisation
• Belgium

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants for sharing their unique life stories with the researchers and, by consequence, the larger public. We strongly believe that storytelling is a powerful way to inform people about the richness and nuance of human lives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek: [grant number G015515N].