| Full text | |
| Author(s): |
Castellano, Viola
[1]
Total Authors: 1
|
| Affiliation: | [1] Univ Bologna, Brazilian Ctr Anal & Planning, Sao Paulo Res Fdn, Bologna - Italy
Total Affiliations: 1
|
| Document type: | Journal article |
| Source: | CITY & SOCIETY; NOV 2021. |
| Web of Science Citations: | 0 |
| Abstract | |
This article investigates parent advocacy in the child welfare system amongst families living in low-income and racialized urban areas, those most impacted by this system. Drawing from my fieldwork experience at the community-based organization Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) in East Harlem, New York, I interrogate the political trajectory of the organization, its practices, and its purpose. I analyze how the decision parents make to advocate is tied to the injustice, stigma, and surveillance they-and especially mothers-experience in the child welfare system. While exploring how parenting and its political dimension are reshaped for disfranchised mothers through advocacy, I describe the ``fine line{''} between compliance and resistance that CWOP has walked throughout its history to preserve its existence. This article illustrates how this form of activism takes place within a fragmented and increasingly privatized welfare regime, in which community-based organizations struggle for their right to remain political actors and not be overtaken by the logic of service provision. Through my analysis, I aim to contribute to anthropological understandings of the forms of political agency taken up by stigmatized subjects in their interactions with the state, and the limits the state demonstrates in ``hearing{''} their claims and requests for change. (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 18/22947-3 - An ethnography of asylum encounters: changing subjectivities between Italy and Gambia |
| Grantee: | Viola Castellano |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral |