In Place of Difference: An Ethnography of Emplaced Care and Making the Other in Berlin

This thesis examines entangled practices of care and place in one Berlin district. Situated within broader Welcome Politics of care efforts and a reanimation of integration debates following 2015’s migratory movements, I examine a number of integration projects which practised various forms of care for migrant women. Over eighteen months’ ethnographic fieldwork between 2017-2018, I sought to learn from women what these efforts might reveal about relations of place, politics of difference and practices of care, when the relationship between people deemed ‘Other’ and a certain ‘locality’ were taken as an assumed site of intervention. I describe how a multiplicity of alternative spatialities were accomplished by care in these projects, even whilst these projects were often tacitly presupposed by nation-state bound imaginaries of space. I observe this in classrooms, streets, a town hall, a hairdresser’s, homes, market squares, parks and gardens, to describe everyday instances in which the reconfiguration of space through care had implications for the way terms of difference were negotiated, practised and materialised. Yet, as often as such alternative spatialities unsettled terms of difference, they also sustained them. And I find that such multiplicity was achieved as much through care as through conflict. Here, the processual nature of such spaces’ becoming and unravelling became a significant parameter for examining their politics and negotiated existence. I seek to add to critical conversations on care and migration in the context of complex urban environments. by proposing one way in which thinking through care and place together may serve as a useful optic for examining material dimensions of political inequity, and help render legible fleeting or under-articulated makings of alternative spatial possibility.