This article investigates parent advocacy in the child welfare system amongst families living in low-income and racialized urban areas, those most impacted by this system. Drawing from my fieldwork experience at the community-based organization Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) in East Harlem, New York, I interrogate the political trajectory of the organization, its practices, and its purpose. I analyze how the decision parents make to advocate is tied to the injustice, stigma, and surveillance they—and especially mothers—experience in the child welfare system. While exploring how parenting and its political dimension are reshaped for disfranchised mothers through advocacy, I describe the “fine line” between compliance and resistance that CWOP has walked throughout its history to preserve its existence. This article illustrates how this form of activism takes place within a fragmented and increasingly privatized welfare regime, in which community-based organizations struggle for their right to remain political actors and not be overtaken by the logic of service provision. Through my analysis, I aim to contribute to anthropological understandings of the forms of political agency taken up by stigmatized subjects in their interactions with the state, and the limits the state demonstrates in “hearing” their claims and requests for change.

中文翻译：

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走细线：纽约市儿童福利系统中家长倡导的斗争☆

本文调查了生活在低收入和种族化城市地区的家庭中父母在儿童福利系统中的倡导，这些家庭受该系统的影响最大。根据我在纽约东哈莱姆社区组织儿童福利组织项目 (CWOP) 的实地工作经验，我询问了该组织的政治轨迹、实践和目的。我分析了父母做出的倡导决定如何与他们——尤其是母亲——在儿童福利系统中所经历的不公正、耻辱和监视联系在一起。在探索如何通过倡导为被剥夺权利的母亲重塑育儿及其政治层面时，我描述了 CWOP 在其整个历史中为保持其存在而走的顺从和抵抗之间的“细线”。本文说明了这种形式的激进主义是如何在一个支离破碎且日益私有化的福利制度中发生的，在这个制度中，以社区为基础的组织为保持政治行为者的权利而斗争，而不是被提供服务的逻辑所取代。通过我的分析，我旨在帮助人类学理解被污名化的主体在与国家的互动中所采取的政治代理形式，以及国家在“听取”他们的主张和改变要求时所表现出的限制。