‘Ik draag deze lezing op aan iedereen die zich verzet tegen gewelddadige instituties’, zo begon de Brits-Australische schrijver en onafhankelijke wetenschapper Sara Ahmed haar voordracht in juni 2024 in Rotterdam. Ahmed, een lesbische vrouw van kleur, staat bekend om haar baanbrekende werk op het gebied van feministische theorie, fenomenologie, culturele studies, queer theory en critical race theory. Haar werk is interdisciplinair, complex, poëtisch en getuigt van een diepe betrokkenheid bij sociale rechtvaardigheid. [...]

Sara Ahmed’s work On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life shows how diversity discourses shape institutional life within universities. Three related concepts in this work are ‘non-performativity’, ‘doing the document’, and ‘plumbing’. In this essay, we examine these concepts in the context of diversity policy within Dutch universities and municipalities. We draw from ethnographic fieldwork to expose how commitments to diversity fail to effect change, how policies circulate without profoundly altering institutional practices, and how administrators strategically navigate institutional resistance. By doing so, we give these concepts a specific situated understanding for the Netherlands. In addition, based on our material, we engage with and advance two arguments from Ahmed’s work. First, we argue that using data as ‘institutional switch’ lays bare bureaucratic anxieties about reproducing institutional racism. Second, we reveal how doing the document engages in a white politics of time. We end with a note about breaking the ‘brick wall’ and embracing alternative ways of being, thinking, and relating. This means finding each other despite institutional isolation, especially when institutions see us as ‘the problem’. This also means attentive listening, seeing, and learning from uncomfortable histories that shape our present. Only then we can dismantle whiteness.

According to anthropological theories of the gift, recipients of social benefits such as refugees in Europe are engaged in relations of social debt. Here I argue that, within the framework of capitalist societies, concepts of social debt and repayment do not prove adequate in addressing social relations between powerful institutions and disempowered populations. This article demonstrates that existing studies of giving back in such relationships do not fully grasp the ambiguous and complex dynamics within neoliberal economies that grant rights to refugees such as social benefits while, as displaced people, also place their belonging to society under question mark. My argument is illustrated through the example of refugees who, having fled from Syria, are allocated a house in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Socially indebted, these permit holders “give back” by launching an “initiative” to help others, with the assumption that this will enable them to step out of their precarious and liminal position of social indebtedness and enter into the realm of sociality and exchange. However, this article shows that in a landscape of outsourced service provision, superexploited labor, and subcontracting arrangements, the social debts these permit holders allegedly collected do not get redeemed.

Neoliberal reform of welfare and integration regimes affects service provisioning for migrants and refugees across Europe. This article studies the effects of competitive tenders (aanbestedingen) as a modality of such reform on the political possibilities of small-scale grassroots initiatives that support recent newcomers in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. This article studies these dynamics from the perspective of activists who self-identify as brokers and who assist the organisers of these small-scale initiatives. So far, existing research has rarely looked at the interstices of literature on brokerage and literature of neoliberal reform nor applied literature on neoliberal reform of the nexus of integration/welfare governance in cities—despite evidence that brokers have appeared as critical figures in the context of neoliberalisation and (re)politicisation. Brokerage and neoliberal reform are part and parcel of urban theorising and so are collaborative dimensions to urban governance, urban approaches to asylum and integration, and urban inequalities. Combining studies on brokerage with studies of neoliberal reform, this article shows that brokers make use of their positioning in-between the city administration and small-scale grassroots organisations to engage in a form of world-making that re-connects resistance to depoliticised elements of arrival infrastructure—while trying to help small-scale support initiatives to formalise. The main argument is that the interplay between informal and formal infrastructure gives unique insight into the political-economic dimensions of infrastructuring and to constitutive contradictions that underpin neoliberalisation. It is based on long-term ethnographic research, including a year of full-time fieldwork in Delfshaven, a classic arrival quarter.

Ordinary encounters can be social scientific entry points to dive deep into broader structural conditions and historic transformations that underpin everyday ways of living together. This book is an engaging read for those interested in how multiple structural conditions intersect and how they are positioned vis-à-vis historical periods of colonialism, postcolonial nation building, and global warfare. Whilst being ethnographically situated with Afghans who fled to Pakistan, this book invites the reader to draw acute parallels with the dismantling of hospitality towards refugees in the post-2015 crisis in European refugee reception, the hostile governing of uprooted people who experience oppressions at the intersections of ethnicity and class, and the effects of the nationalist territorialization of spaces across the globe. It does so without losing specificity and situatedness: microhistories of Afghans in Pakistan are reconstructed through over 500 semi-structured interviews and material from archives that add factual context to what makes possible the poverty, harassment, imprisonment, torture and deportation of Afghans who have fled to urban Pakistan from the Soviet-Afghan war in 1970 onwards and try to make a living. [...]

This contribution focuses on volunteer initiatives that seek to assist refugee status holders in Rotterdam. It studies initiatives that are still in the process of fine-tuning their focus, grappling for funds, searching for volunteers, and seeking collaborations. The article lays bare the inequalities that such aspiring initiatives can be premised on and produce. In analyzing moments in which the label of ‘volunteer’ is rejected—or instead celebrated or transformed—this article demonstrates that the elastic representation of volunteering clashes with callous boundaries between ‘being only a volunteer’ and ‘doing something together.’ These boundaries are heartfelt by the organizers of these aspiring initiatives, who often have a refugee background themselves. By understanding inequality in volunteering in relation to debates about active citizenship, this article seeks to examine the workings of the glass ceiling that hinders the organizers of volunteer initiatives to transition into a position they consider more credible and professional.

Applaus voor ‘onze helden van de zorg’ weerklonk in maart 2020, tijdens de eerste winter van de verschillende bestuurlijke, ecologische en medische crises die het Covid-19 virus veroorzaakte en blootlegde. De toejuiching was een collectief moment van aandacht voor de doorgaans onzichtbare krachten die repareren, ondersteunen, verzorgen, onderhouden, bevoorraden, schoonmaken en troosten. Het te vaak miskende domein van zorg – een domein waarin vrouwen en andere geprecariseerde mensen en groepen doorgaans een centrale rol vervullen – kreeg kortstondig waardering. [...]

In the wake of mass-migrations of refugees seeking safety and stability in Europe, this contribution studies emerging grassroots organizations that support refugee status holders in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The municipality expects these organizations to adhere to the European trend to incorporate immigrant integration priorities in interventions that apply to all residents. The article discusses the paradox of how bureaucratic classifications regarding preferred target groups cast certain grassroots responses as fringe-activities that are less legible bureaucratically. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, this article shows how this lessened legibility translates into profound insecurities for grassroots organizers. The article discusses how these insecurities, in combination with the uncertainty grassroots organizers feel regarding their employability, motivate them to play guessing games and to give in to municipal preferences to boost their eligibility for funding. It argues that this process of giving in to municipal preferences should be understood as an attempt to render their endeavors legible, reduce precariousness, secure a livelihood, and turn affective labor into a life-sustaining practice. In so doing, this contribution evokes the story of a particular grassroots organizer—a woman of color with a forced migration background.

The “humanitarian border” that emerged at the Aegean Islands of Chios and Lesbos during the so called “refugee crisis” arose out of various engagements with care and control. A humanitarian border can be said to consist of the entanglements between humanitarianism and securitization. But how do care and control materialize in practice and how can they move from one place to another? By combining the notion of the “humanitarian border” with the concept of “viapolitics” and an actor-network lens, and based on interviews with state authorities, volunteers and NGOs, this article brings in three claims. First, by studying the “missing masses”, the humanitarian border can be said to arise out of “conjoint actions” that concern engagement with peoples and objects of all sorts. Second, the humanitarian border is not only of a composite nature but of a mobile nature as well. Third, the interstructure of the humanitarian border is generated by a productive relationship between the fluidity of network configurations on the one hand and emerging frictions on the other. By studying the situated tensions between humanitarianism and securitization and focusing on the circulation of materialities of all sorts the movements that make up a humanitarian border can be displayed.

In the Netherlands from 2015 onwards, the ‘spectacle’ (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015) of people arriving into Europe seeking refuge was channeled by vast media attention and political debate. These events triggered a vast response of bottom-up initiatives in the Netherlands wanting to support refugee status holders. In this contribution, I focus on such newly emerged initiatives that seek to support refugee status holders in Rotterdam, the second-largest city in the Netherlands. It discusses the struggles that the initiators of these initiatives face, who more often than not have a refugee background themselves. It shows how these struggles originate from the ambiguous categorizations of group-making that experimental policies presuppose in the field of refugee reception and support in urban spaces today. [...]

Since 2015, residents in Europe have responded to the so-called “refugee crisis” by undertaking bottom-up activities in which they engage with newcomers. These resident responses—both supportive and restrictive towards refugee reception—apply pressure on governments to change protection regimes. In the Netherlands, for example, “ordinary people” join anti-migrant patrol groups that target refugees, or assist border-crossers and accommodate refugees. In this article, I study grassroots movements in which residents undertake practices focused on refugee reception in the Netherlands, and discuss the democratic potential of these undertakings. In the wake of extensive neoliberal processes that seek to “craft good citizens” and emerging forms of public action that bring perceived injustices to light, this article investigates the cracks and continuities between practices of care and control. It does so by analysing and comparing two explanatory mechanisms that prevail in recent literature to account for grassroots movements: active citizenship and counter-powers.

Sinds The Eagles eind jaren zeventig van de vorige eeuw Hotel California uitbrachten, is de abstracte songtekst op veel manieren geïnterpreteerd. Het hotel zou een metafoor voor de hel zijn, het zou refereren aan satanisme, en het zou gaan over decadentie en verval. Als setting van gastvrijheid bij uitstek openbaart het hotel zich in de duistere rocksong als een unheimische plek waar je eigenlijk niet te lang wilt zijn, maar waar je ook niet gemakkelijk wegkomt. Deze bedrieglijke hotelgezelligheid wordt ook in de cinematografie gretig benut: in The Shining zien we Jack na all work and no play langzaam krankzinnig worden in een verlaten hotel, en in Psycho kan de hotelier niet voorkomen dat damesbloed op de klanken van ijselijke vioolmuziek door het doucheputje wegstroomt. Het anonieme hoteldecor suggereert kalmte en warmte maar herbergt geheimen en geweld. Niets is wat het lijkt. […]

Together with the normalization of the idea that migration is irregular and that it should be managed and restricted (Jansen et al. 2015: xi), the conveying of information on migration across the Mediterranean in terms of emergency, disaster, flows and numbers has become standard. Particularly in the European spring, the image of ‘swelling masses of desperate Africans fleeing poverty and war at home are trying to enter Europe illegally’ (IOM 2008: 11) is drawn upon. In April of this year forexample, President of the European Council Donald Tusk warned the Members of the European Parliament that, concerning ‘the Central Mediterranean route ... the numbers of would-be migrants in Libya are alarming’ (European Council 2016). The UNHCR estimates that in Libya ‘at least 100,000 migrants’ are ‘packed into towns and cities along its western coast’ (Stephen 2016) waiting for the weather to clear and to cross the sea to Europe. Military advisor for UN Libya envoy Martin Kobler claims this number to be ‘a million of potential migrants’ (DW 2016). [...]