Informal Participation, a Vector of Political Engagement? The Ambiguities of Individual Activation in the Neighboodmothers Program in Berlin

This paper deals with the relationship to politics of migrant women of working-classes background, residents of a underprivileged community. I focus on two spaces of informal participation: a cooking workshop and a parents’ café. The idea is to ponder this participation by the prism of their consequences in terms of politicization and empowerment. The two spaces of participation are instigated, financed and supervised by the « quartiersmanagement ». Since the end of 1990s, teams of « quartiersmanagement » have been set up in certain neighborhoods targeted by the federal program « Social City » as « territories with a particular need of development ». These teams seek to promote the participation and the « activation » of the residents. For that purpose, they instigate or promote « low-thresold » (niedrigschwellig) forms of participation. The principle is that the offered activities have to connect with everyday activities and inclusive enough to « reach » the social groups (the « targeted groups ») the most distant from classical forms of civic engagement. The parents’ café in a primary school and the cooking workshop managed by an association offering german courses for migrants are such informal participation spaces, thought as first steps in trajectories of engagement and politicization. These spaces gather almost essentially women and especially some who are employed as « neighborhoodmothers ». Financed by the Jobcenter, an institution born from the Hartz reforms and which roughly organize the workfare in Germany, this program is based on a peer-to-peer approach: it employs women with migration background who, instead of becoming welfare recipients, act as social workers, work as intermediaries in their own « communities » to help for the education and integration of children and parents. For that purpose, they are notably assigned to community projects instigated by the quartiermanagement. Through participant observation, I investigated those spaces during two years. The idea was to grasp collective and individual process in the making, and their consequences on the relationship with politics of the « neighborhoodmothers ». Inspired by an ethnographical and interactionnist approach of politics (Eliasoph, 1998; Eliasoph, Lichterman, 2003), this study about collective and individual process has proceeded through the detailed description and analysis of the interactions which take place in and around those participation spaces. The investigated women meet eachother among women and, by dint of interacting regularly, create a self which bring them to learn some civic skills and even to denounce certain injustices which they are victims of (especially as women). This can be seen as a first step in a politicization process. However, these processes of politicization and empowerment are limited. Through institutional supervision of their participation and of those spaces, they cannot lead to collective mobilisation and let the investigated women consequently alone in front of their own empowerment.