| Kommentar |
This project seminar, which will be taught in English and German, starts from the perspective of the resourceful city: the city is not a fixed opportunity structure to which some have better access than others, but a social infrastructure, always in the making, that reinforces structural social inequalities. The second starting point is that we see urban inequalities not as social structure simply spatially reflected, but understand the urban itself as structuring (as in Bourdieu’s concept of spatial profit) while at the same time, urbanites, in our case especially parents, more specifically mothers, are agents shaping the city, making it work for their families. We ask how parenting, especially mothering, with a focus on the ensuring of capabilities for one’s children to enhance or reproduce social positions, is done. What resources do families organize? How? And how do their practices carry inclusionary and exclusionary consequences? In the first part of the seminar, we discuss literature to develop a collective conceptual frame. In the second part, starting at the end of the winter semester, students develop hands-on research skills through conducting interviews with Berlin mothers in specific neighbourhoods in East Berlin, building on to an existing data-set of interviews with mothers in Zehlendorf and Wedding. Current developments in the city, including the strong advertising for family life and family virtues of both the AfD and the NPD in especially – but not only – Eastern parts of the city suggests that anxieties and experiences of downward social mobility and fears for the family’s future in an increasingly unequal city are sharp there. One of the questions to explore is how practices and perceptions of mothering in the metropolis differ, if at all, in East and West Berlin. Depending on the number of participants, additional data-collection will consist of conducting structured surveys to add a quantitative dimension to the project. |
