Circuiting parents’ voice: Parenting discussion groups and institutional healing in northeast Paris

Abstract

The discussion group is a common form of parenting support offered by associations in the pluri-ethnic, working-class neighborhoods of northeast Paris. Situated in a larger formation of voice that hails marginalized parents to speak, professionals engage with these discussion groups as potential social ‘transistors’: simultaneously circuiting parents’ voice inwards to restore parents’ agentive capacities and amplifying it outwards into an audible collective voice aimed at impacting state–citizen relations. In order to reach this double effect, professionals deploy ‘paralinguistic techniques’, which produce and combine intimate and civic, normative and alternative (semi-)public speech contexts. As a result, discussion groups emerge as pedagogical instances of a ‘Republican’ public sphere and its reworkings. Against the backdrop of anxieties of a disintegrating Republic and failing institutions, discussion groups highlight a desire for new conduits of citizenship, as well as the ways in which marginalized residents are called upon to invest these with their voice.