Motherwork and Space: Social and Political Participation of Mothers in Sweden’s racialised Suburbs

Abstract: This thesis engages with the motherwork of racialised migrant mothers in Sweden’s racialised suburbs. It employs theories of racial geographies, particularly black women’s geographies and motherwork to investigate the articulations of motherwork in space. Deploying a black feminist lens on empirical material from a Swedish-Somali mothers’ group engaged in community activism, the thesis argues that motherwork is operationalised as a subject position of space and social transformation. To examine this argument, three dimensions of motherwork are considered. First, motherwork as a subject position of space, as the mothers studied constitute themselves as knowledgeable agents through their experiences in and of their residential area. Next, it focuses on the mothers’ community-based activities concerning safety-creation as practices of motherwork. Lastly, it presents the transformative potentials of the mothers’ motherwork to normative understandings of racialised suburbs and subject categories such as “Black Muslim mothers” and “migrant mothers”. Ultimately, motherwork is formulated by the mothers as public, collective and political.