Cohort: SOMET 40
Topic of the thesis: Trajectories of mothers at risk within the child protection system in Italy
Abstract:The project examines the institutional processes, networks and mechanisms of the child protection system in Italy, with the aim of reconstructing the ways in which mothers considered at risk for neglect navigate the set of places and texts that compose this complex system. Particular attention will be given to the examination of the operative context of residential mother and child care institutions ("comunità mamma-bambino"), namely facilities where mothers, removed by court decision from their domestic spaces due to different, and often interconnected, reasons (gender-based violence, drug addiction, psychiatric disorders, extreme social isolation and poverty, etc.) are placed together with their children. In this context several professional figures (social workers, educators, psychologists and psychotherapists, social health operators, lawyers and legal advisors, cultural mediators) work with mothers at risk, connecting the women's lives to several institutions and professional discourses that contribute to frame and regulate their deviance. Through qualitative and ethnographic field research, the project is aimed at understanding how institutional processes organise the relationship between operators and mothers at risk in these facilities; how the mothers' frailties and lived experiences orient their regulation and their trajectories within the child protection system and how they navigate such a system and the related network of professionals and institutional settings.
Research interests: Gender studies - motherhood - social production and reproduction - deviance - social control
Graduated from: University of Turin; Leiden University; University of Padua
Degrees obtained: BA in Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures; MA in Literary Studies; MA in Sociology and Social Research
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