Aspirational Justice and the Capability to Aspire for a Better Future Among Migrant Women in France

This paper questions the conditions for aspirational justice – understood as the provision of fair opportunities for people to imagine desirable futures. Drawing on Sen’s idea of justice, we make the capability to aspire key for aspirational justice, which requires taking account of the multi-layered environment people live in and the set of resources and constraints resulting from it. In the case of migrant women with precarious and uncertain administrative status, constraints include the need to cope with the accidents of the past and the trickiness of the present - i.e. working in very precarious conditions; dealing with either limited language or professional skills or with lack of evidence thereof; and yet having to care for their family while navigating their own trajectory. While their daily lives are largely shaped by the constraints imposed by the French Immigration law, migrant women may find support in local initiatives, at the municipal or neighborhood level. We argue that the conditions for aspirational justice depend on the configurations in which public institutions and third sector organisations interact, leading local initiatives to function either as traps or as opportunities for aspirational justice. Our empirical focus is a training programme geared at acquisition of language and prevocational skills in the Paris region. Our research data consist of public policy documents; 25 life story interviews; and semi-structured fieldnotes at a participatory action research project. First, we present our analytical framework of aspirational justice based on Sen’s Capability Approach and Appadurai’s capacity to aspire. Second, we discuss how the different institutions involved in shaping migrant trajectories interact and the tensions that arise in the case of the training programme under study. Third, we present a selection of women’s trajectories to explore the variety of configurations, either favourable or unfavourable to the flourishing of their capability to aspire.