Afterword to mothering practices in times of legal precarity

ABSTRACT

This Afterword to the special issue “Mothering Practices in Times of Legal Precarity: Activism, Care, and Resistance in Displacement” relates the authors’ findings regarding how displaced women adapt their mothering practices to the uncertain legal situations in which they live to key terms in ethnic and racial studies. For each of these key terms—mothering, practices, time, and legal precarity—we learn how the authors and the actors they study construct ideas, through which processes and with which consequences. The Afterword reviews the profound effect of legal precarity on the intersection of mothering practices, time orientations, gendered racialization, and belonging across multiple spaces. It outlines the interplay of structure and agency, biography and history.

KEYWORDS:

• Mothering
• legal precarity
• migration
• refugees
• & asylum
• agency
• temporality
• belonging

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to Laurie Tikue Lijnders and Magdalena Suerbaum, the editors of this special issue, for inviting me to write this Afterword and thus for sharing with me this wonderful collection of ethnographic articles. For inspiration regarding these themes, I thank, among others, Erdmute Alber, Elizabeth Beloe, Cati Coe, Heike Drotbohm, Charlotte Faircloth, Franziska Fay, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, and Julia Pauli. I treasure relevant conversations on legal precarity, human rights, and the sociology of knowledge with Joachim Savelsberg. They are part of a shared life.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.