26.06.2025
[Colloquium:] Mothers and the "War on Drugs" in Europe: Understanding Urban Violence through Visual and Collaborative Methods
Thursday, 26 June 2025, 18.15 - 20.00 CET; Room 101, Institut für Soziologie (Wilhelmstr. 36, 72074 Tübingen) and via Zoom
On Thursday, 26 June (18.15 - 20.00 CET), Alice Daquin (University of Amsterdam) will give a talk on “Mothers and the ‘War on Drugs’ in Europe: Understanding Urban Violence through Visual and Collaborative Methods”. This talk will be held in room 101 at the Insitut für Soziologie (Wilhelmstraße 36, 72074 Tübingen) and can be followed online via Zoom. This event is the third session of the G-TURN colloquium "Urbanities in a Global Perspective: Crises, Changes, and Continuities" of the summer term 2025.
Biography
I am a socio-anthropologist with a doctorate from the Graduate Institute of Geneva, and I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Amsterdam. For the past ten years, I have been working on marginalized neighborhoods in France through collaborative projects focusing on youth participation, crime, and its repression, and, more recently, state-led social experimentation. Deeply interdisciplinary—straddling sociology, anthropology, and political science —my research relies on ethnographic, audiovisual, and collaborative methodologies.
Abstract
My talk will draw upon urban anthropology and gender studies to analyze how mothers in poor neighborhoods physically and spatially negotiate the violent competition between the police and drug trafficking. Based on an ethnographic study conducted in 2021/2022 in a housing estate in northern Marseille (France) and utilizing drawings for spatial analysis, I examine how these mothers navigate a strategic yet precarious intermediary space between drug trafficking and the police on a daily basis. The French state’s war on drugs, targeting drug trafficking in poor neighborhoods, has profoundly disrupted local social life. Mothers face spatial injunctions from both police officers and traffickers, aimed at excluding them from public outdoor spaces, while domestic spaces are simultaneously threatened by trafficking-related intrusions and police raids. As a result, these mothers are particularly vulnerable to forms of violence that tend to dispossess them of their living spaces. Nevertheless, some of them enjoy a form of local respectability that enables them to develop intermediation tactics to manage the interface between drug traffickers and police agents. They embody the role of the "good mother" by monitoring the distance between the neighborhood’s children and traffickers, act as “outspoken mediators” by intervening in local altercations and occasionally accept the role of safeguarding the presence of local social workers. In a context of competitive loyalties, their art of intermediation hinges on a delicate and uncertain balance between inter-feminine solidarity and mutual comparison
Share
