A mother’s café and a women’s workshop
Analyzing the local-level implementation of participatory integration policies, this article asks how a stronger tie is woven between migrant women and French and Finnish societies. Careful observation of a mothers’ café in Helsinki and a creative writing workshop in Paris, two distinct tools of participative integration policies, allows for discovering significant differences in the tie that is effectively produced between migrant women and their host society despite the policies’ identical agendas. Unconvinced by the interpretative framework of ‘national models of integration’, this research examines variation in the techniques of ‘attachment work’ in the light of local-level explananda, namely the history of the institutions and the organization of the policy tools that are being compared. It advocates for the ethnographic method’s unique contribution to international comparison, i.e. the possibility to develop multi-level analyses and partial but realist comparisons.