ABSTRACT
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among newcomer full-time mothers in the capital region of Finland, this chapter explores migrant-based notions of citizenization by examining the ways in which the women negotiate their own and their family members’ early paths to citizenship. The analysis conceptualizes citizenship as an assemblage of “techniques” deployed by newcomer mothers within a biopolitical governance context. The women share a position as recent migrants, a life situation of having small children and the subsequent urge to redefine their social position in society at large. Their national and ethnic background is diverse. The analysis illuminates the ways in which research participants claim moral space as future citizens through narratives of the responsible and disciplined migrant family. However, in the local Finnish welfare state, ideals of the self-sufficient individual are contradictory, simultaneously regulated by an increasingly non-negotiable state-guided integration process. That way, the subjectivities available to these women and their children are linked to wider questions of social mobility and engagement.
