Motherhood in Conflictual Circumstances - Practices of Tesistance and the Child's Positioning

Current debates in the context of child protection, framing (inadequate) parenting skills as a potential risk for children and their development, serve as a point of departure for our argumentation. Based on an ethnographic research project in Mother and Child Residential Services in Germany, it links the reconstruction of attributions on motherhood at risk with the issues of how the vulnerable child is constructed. Given those discussions on child protection, we will sketch out how motherhood at risk is attributed and institutionalized in specific socio-pedagogical settings. As this preventive measure is characterized by numerous interventions concerning the woman's way of living and parenting as a mother, the article focusses on resistances and conflicts that occur in local practices asking how and what for the child is used in them. Sensitizing concepts are theories of power and Institutional Ethnography.