How did you come to choose your research topic?
My choice of research topic is rooted in both the political context and my personal intellectual journey. During my master’s studies at Sciences Po Lyon (France), I developed an interest in socio-spatial inequalities, particularly the political treatment of segregated, immigrant, and poor neighbourhoods in France. My previous research focused on how the youth in these areas were targeted by state and private actors. However, I noticed a significant gender gap in the broader research on urban margins, which often emphasised masculine experiences.
When I joined the ERC project “Gangs, Gangsters, and Ganglands: Towards a Global Comparative Ethnography” as a PhD student at the Graduate Institute, I had the opportunity to develop my own research question in a collaborative and critical environment. Choosing to focus on adult women’s experiences was not only a response to this gender gap in the literature but also an effort to reconceptualise urban politics. What if, instead of focusing on elections, youth riots, or organised social movements that dominate the headlines, we examined the political practices and imaginations of mothers in their everyday lives? This became the starting point for my research.
Can you describe your thesis questions and your methodology?
My research began with an observation drawn from existing literature: despite common narratives, the state, as a fragmented entity, is not absent from marginalised spaces. Instead, it maintains a complex and ambiguous presence. Poor residents increasingly rely on state services while simultaneously facing heightened state suspicion and repressive policies. Women, particularly mothers, often find themselves on the front lines of these fraught interactions, with some taking on the responsibility of mediating these encounters for their communities. This led to my central research question: How does this everyday political intermediation by mothers shape the relationship between residents and the state in urban margins?
To answer this, I conducted nearly a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a social housing neighbourhood in northern Marseille. I observed and followed women in their daily interactions with state representatives and interviewed both these women and local state actors, including teachers, municipal employees, police officers, and social workers. I also employed audiovisual and collaborative methods, such as drawings for spatial analysis and feminine talking circles to collectively explore mothers’ experiences with the state.
What are your major findings?
Firstly, while classical clientelism literature often emphasises electoral dynamics and patronage relationships, I identified four “spacetimes” in which mothers perform political intermediation: the residential environment, social-services bureaus, women’s associations, and institutional meetings. These contexts give rise to various intermediation practices, such as protection intermediations in the conflicting residential environment, paper intermediations at the bureaus, anchoring intermediations in women’s associations, and speech intermediations at institutional meetings. These practices allow mothers to negotiate resources, regulate street violence, represent their communities, and act as conduits for local politics. Although only a minority of residents engage in such activities, their actions significantly impact how residents materially and symbolically relate to the state.
Secondly, my research highlights the intersectional power dynamics shaping these intermediation processes. The mothers’ roles are framed as acts of maternal devotion to their neighbourhoods, which simultaneously challenge and reinforce gendered spatial and social norms that confine women to the private sphere. Their intermediation practices both reproduce and destabilise gender ideologies while negotiating the reach of state domination. I propose “political maternalism” as a concept that captures how maternal identities and values are politically mobilised – not only in social movements or state policies but also through co-constructed processes between the state and citizens in specific contexts.
So, through their various intermediations, these mothers end up with a certain amount of political power?
My research underscores the creative ways marginalised residents navigate their relationships with the state, developing tactics to maintain a balance – keeping the state neither too distant nor too intrusive. It highlights the pervasive effects of state domination in poor neighbourhoods while honouring residents’ ingenuity in “dealing with” the state. In doing so, it indeed reframes mothers not merely as actors in family care and domestic economies but as vital and understudied political agents managing state relations. While political discourses often depict them as either negligent parents or heroic allies of the state, my research reveals their “in-between” position to be far more complex and fragile, resisting simplistic narratives of resistance or complicity.
What are you doing now?
I recently started a postdoctoral position at the University of Amsterdam in December 2024. This role allows me to extend my fieldwork in Marseille by delving deeper into welfare governance in poor neighbourhoods. As part of the project “Prototyping Welfare in Europe: Experiments in State and Society,” led by Anouk de Koning, I will compare experiences of the welfare state in urban fringes across Europe, including London, Amsterdam, Marseille, and Thessaloniki. Our ethnographies will closely examine how private and public actors shape social policies amidst neoliberal pressures, institutional racism, and participatory ambitions.
* * *
Alice Daquin defended her PhD thesis in Anthropology and Sociology, titled “L’intermédiation aux marges de l’État: une ethnographie du maternalisme politique dans un quartier populaire de Marseille”, on 30 September 2024. She wrote in a post on LinkedIn : “Many thanks to the members of my jury for the stimulating and intense discussion: Dennis Rodgers, my thesis supervisor and professor of anthropology at the IHEID in Geneva, Julie Billaud, my second reader and professor of anthropology at the IHEID in Geneva, Marie-Hélène Bacqué, sociologist and urban planner, professor emeritus, and Julien Talpin, director of research in political science at the CNRS.”
Read a related article by Dr Daquin:
“Dépossessions spatiales et négociations des mères au sein d’une cité marseillaise: pour une approche spatiale des rapports intersectionnels de pouvoir” (Mothers’ Spatial Dispossession and Negotiations at the Urban Margins of Marseille: Towards a Spatial Approach to Intersectionality) in Genre, sexualité et société (no. 32, Autumn 2024), https://doi.org/10.4000/12xub.
Citation of the PhD thesis:
Daquin, Alice. “L’intermédiation aux marges de l’État: une ethnographie du maternalisme politique dans un quartier populaire de Marseille.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2024.
Access:
Members of the Geneva Graduate Institute can access the thesis via this page of the repository. Others can contact Dr Daquin.
Banner image by Alice Daquin.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.