Parents, particularly those positioned as deviating from a “mythical norm” (Lorde, 1993, p. 202) of a middle-class, “white,” heterosexual, healthy, and high-performing “normal family” (cf. Fitz-Klausner et al., 2021), are responsibilised for their children’s educational participation (Jergus, 2019). Thus, parental educational effort rather than structural conditions are looked at when it comes to explaining unequal educational trajectories. This paper examines parental education programs of migrant organizations where knowledge, for example about the school system or the dominant language, is negotiated as a prerequisite for “good” parenthood and successful integration (Kollender, 2020). Based on the Swiss National Science Foundation–funded research project “Parental Engagement in the Context of Childhoods Shaped by Education: Formations and Negotiations within Migration Relations”, our paper centres on the conditions under which familial norms of good parenting and engagement are enacted within migration relations. How do parents, who are potentially marked as “non-fitting”, invoke hegemonic norms of “good” parenthood (Walsh, 2018) as well as “good” immigrant (Hackl, 2022) when engaging in educational settings? These questions are addressed through a subjectivation-theoretically informed reconstruction (Ricken et al., 2023) of a biographical interview. Biography is understood as an interface between the narrating subject and social reality, as an approach to “subject–context relations” (Dausien et al., 2016, p. 30). Drawing on an interview with a mother, the paper explores how the integration dispositif is entangled with migrant parental engagement. It shows how processes of migrantisation are often accompanied by de-qualification, channeling individuals into labour market niches marked as “suitable”. Migrant knowledge and engagement thereby become professional and social resources, and yet remain closely linked to institutions and projects aimed at migrants, where they are made productive. The analysis illustrates how, within social structures shaped by racism, ideas of “good” parenthood are bound to the figure of the “good” (well-integrated) immigrant. Engagement thus appears as both Doing Good Citizenship and Doing Good Immigrant, making it impossible to escape this figure. The paper argues that migrantised engagement, shaped by experiences of non-belonging, becomes visible as a struggle for integrity that appears fragile and at risk and opens only narrow spaces of agency within the integration dispositif.

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