‘Hey, teach these kids to eat their own food!’: Institutional intergroup contact in immigrant mothers' talk

Abstract

Although informal segregation often persists in multiethnic neighbourhoods, local institutions offering public services may act as an important setting for intergroup contact. Therefore, we studied how immigrant mothers of young children discursively construct institutional intergroup contact with workers of public playgrounds and kindergartens. We conducted longitudinal interviews with 10 immigrant mothers three times over the period of a year in 2 multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in Helsinki, Finland. Using Critical Discursive Psychology, we analysed respondents' talk about the encounters and identified three interpretative repertoires: ‘contact as asserting rights’, ‘contact as helping’, and ‘contact as cultural rectification’. Our analysis showed how mothers positioned themselves and the workers differently in terms of agency and power in each repertoire. Our findings stress the importance of studying people's own sense-making of institutional contact, with different roles for participants, and that construction of agency within institutional contact is important for building equal membership in society. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.