Articles in press (accepted for publication) are made available online in this section pending the publication of the full issue. All available articles have been subjected to the Journal’s double-blind evaluation process.
These articles may be cited using the following information: Names, first names of author(s), title of article, year of publication
Research Framework: This article is based on a PhD research in socio-anthropology about the transmission of familial memory among Rwandans living in France. We are interested in the day-to-day kinship of orphans after the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Objectives: The objective of this article is to provide a better understanding of family reconfigurations in post-genocide Rwanda. We will see how the care of orphans has transformed the boundaries of kinship.
Methodology: We conducted an ethnographic study based on a non-linear fieldwork from 2014 to 2019. We carried out semi-directive interviews with Rwandans living in France who were less than 20 years old in 1994, as well as with their family members, in France or in Rwanda. This was complemented with the development of kinship trees and with observations made during commemorations.
Results: We document here several hosting situations for orphans after the Tutsi genocide: foster care, children’s households and orphanages. The Rwandan government pursued family-based policy that aimed at “reunification” or placement in a family. We present configurations of households of care that may or may not involve relatives, or even protect themselves from them.
Conclusions: The genocide provoked a crisis of orphans’ care that impacted kinship relations, through acts of solidarity or hostility. Households of care and lines of transmission have seen their boundaries redrawn by affective and material exclusion and inclusion of orphans.
Contribution: The article allows us to reinscribe kinship relations and everyday kinship in a given socio-economical and historical context, that of post-genocide Rwanda. It sheds light on the family and societal changes that occur in the aftermath of genocide.
Research framework: Since the 1990s, the French government has developed social and fiscal policies that encourage families to use home-based employment to delegate domestic, parental and care work. The objective was to encourage women’s ability to fulfil multiple social commitments. However, the studies point to the persistence of class inequalities in the practice of delegation and emphasize the workload that it implies for women.
Objectives: This article aims to understand the class and gender mechanisms at work in the practice of delegation. It thus identifies the extent to which the contemporary French reproduction regime, namely the organizational referential for the practices of taking charge of the activities that sustain human life, alleviates domestic work in families and particularly for women.
Methodology: Based on semi-directive interviews conducted in Île-de-France as part of a doctoral research project in sociology with 38 families, we will capture a set of measures emblematic of the reproduction regime through family practices: socio-fiscal incentive policies for family employment.
Results: The analysis shows that by leaving the organizational referential of the reproduction regime unchanged, socio-fiscal incentive policies for family employment maintain and even reinforce class and gender inequalities.
Conclusions: As long as the French reproduction regime does not reconsider the foundations of its organizational frame of reference, we have every reason to believe that policies encouraging the delegation of family activities will have unequal consequences.
Contribution: This article shows how the inconsistencies between referential and social practices hinder the transformative impact of public policies.
Research Framework: Inequalities in access to childcare for young children are particularly strong in France. We analyze them through the question of the non-recourse to rights and services (Warin,2016) in order to think about families’ childcare arrangements in relation to a local public offer.
Objectives: The objective is to research the different ways in which working-class mothers choose to care for their children when faced with a very inadequate public supply of early childhood care and an allocation criteria that are not favourable to them.
Methodology: The empirical survey is based on comprehensive interviews that were carried out with mothers (N = 27) in three working-class neighbourhoods in a city with very few childcare facilities.
Results: The analysis shows different forms of non-use that mothers have of childcare facilities. These forms are linked to the social and professional situations they are confronted with, that is in connection with an inadequate local supply: an assumed or asserted non-demand; a lack of information and knowledge of the supply and administrative procedures; a failure to offer and receive alternative proposals to the crèche, informal childcare by relatives or under the table. As their children grow older, mothers express increasing needs for care that are specifically at their development and socialization, and not only the needs related to their professional activity.
Conclusions: The difficulties encountered by mothers raise questions about the quantity and quality of municipal childcare provision, as well as the cobbling together of formal and informal childcare solutions.
Contribution: To understand whether or not mothers have recourse to extra-familial childcare, we emphasize the importance of simultaneously taking into account the situation of the local supply with which they are directly confronted and their own social and professional situation.
