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- Convenors:
-
Wiebe Ruijtenberg
(Leiden University)
Lieke van der Veer (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Transfers:
- Open for transfers
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the moral and affective nature of the work of classification, by examining moments in which residents and policy makers demand group-specific or generic approaches instead. We highlight contestations around classifications as well as the possibility of classifying differently.
Long Abstract:
The desire to make policies that apply to and treat all residents equally—while identifying specific groups to care for or control—generates thorny questions across welfare states. What are the limits of generic policies? When is it appropriate to construct and differentiate between different groups of residents? When do ‘they’ have group-specific needs? Or when do ‘they’ form group-specific threats? While about good governance and the distribution of resources, these questions are also about policy assumptions about groups of people.
We invite contributions that investigate how policy practitioners juggle with social categorizations; how do they match target audiences of social policies with generic policy preferences? We invite contributions that demonstrate how individuals inhabit institutional identities; how do they define, stretch, and change the meaning of these identities? We welcome contributions that zoom in on collectives of organized residents; how do they resist and/or claim group-specific treatments? We also welcome contributions that foreground how publics emerge in response to contemporary concerns; how do these publics rearticulate pre-existing inequalities into the present; how do these publics push policy practitioners to reconsider practices of and justifications for classification?
This panel highlights the processes of classification and the emergence of publics in Europe. We hope to better understand the different motives for and practices of classification—with the aim of unsettling contentious classifications and of opening up the possibility of classifying differently. We explore these processes from the vantage point of policy makers as well as people who resist or claim group-specific treatments.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
Debates around social housing often revolve around deservingness claims. This paper interrogates the motives for and practices of classification in Flanders' social housing policy reform, showing how a moralised category of 'the deserving local' is constructed to legitimise exclusionary practices.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropologists have shown how debates around public and social housing have become increasingly moralised (Alexander et al 2018), thus often revolving around claims of deservingness. In 2023, the government of Flanders introduced a fundamental restructuring of its social housing policy. A key feature of the reforms was a renewed set of allocation criteria. The Dutch language requirement has been increased, and ‘local ties’ to a neighbourhood afford people priority on wait-lists. One further rule for prospective tenants also applies to current tenants: mandatory registration with the public employment service. According to the minister of housing, the policy reforms will “contribute to the emancipation of the social tenant” and ensure that social housing becomes available to the “right” people.
In this paper, I interrogate the motives for and practices of classification with regards to the policy reform. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a social housing cooperative for migrants, as well as a discourse analysis of political and public debates on the reform, I analyse the ways in which the new allocation criteria are legitimised as well as contested. Departing from the concept of deservingness as a conceptual heuristic (Streinzer and Tosic 2022), I discuss how the new criteria reframe ‘migrant undeservingness’ through the construction of a moralised category of ‘the deserving local’. Tracing policy assumptions about the groups of people that the allocation criteria (should) target, I argue that the classification of who is deserving functions as an exclusionary mechanism and reveals contestations between group-specific and generic approaches in policy-making.
Paper short abstract:
Taking Warsaw as a case study, I look at how EU initiated climate neutrality policies construct its publics, how particular groups are named, represented and targeted in them, and if activists become the publics in the particular local setting.
Paper long abstract:
Taking Warsaw as a case study, I look at the ‘mobile policies’ of green urbanism. For one, the global optics of climate policies suggests they are generic, relevant to all humans and carried out in the name of all. Specifically, the EU policies aimed at climate neutrality in cities declare that ‘no one will be left behind’. However, the concerns are raised that in a largely ‘post-political’ manner of climate policy making people are displaced ‘from the discourse on what counts as “sustainable”’ altogether (Rosol et al. 2017).
The proposed paper relies on the material from a comparative anthropological research on how cities translate EU urban climate neutrality policies (EU-URGE). As one of Mission 100 cities, Warsaw adopts EU mobile policies framings. Simultaneously, it has its own histories of environmental policies and action as well as the specific social and economic conditions. I focus on the policies' translations, and present how climate neutrality policies in Warsaw construct its publics and how particular groups are named, represented and targeted in them. I am also interested in how the grass-root groups that advocate climate mitigation may or may not become the publics of climate neutrality policies as a result of policy mobility.
Paper short abstract:
What does an ethnography of a group of people living out, through and against the policy imports of an official system of racial classification in Singapore tell us about its longevity and potential for change? How can people be both complicit and resistant to how they are imagined and acted upon?
Paper long abstract:
All residents in Singapore, without exception, are ascribed a “racial identity” based on an official framework defined by four letters, CMIO, which stands for Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others. Such racial or ethnic classifications are not unique, but the ways and degree to which it permeates into and organizes social and public life in Singapore have been a source of political and scholarly debate (Chua 2003; Lai 2024). This paper considers the work of contemporary policies and institutions in continuing to give shape and salience to CMIO as a mode of classification, sustaining it as legitimate and necessary, and even a natural way of being-in and relating to the world. In policy terms, this offers the state an expedient basis to differentiate among the population, identify and coopt “community brokers,” and target its group-specific programmes accordingly while, at the same time, claim a space of neutrality towards all groups, having attended to each. A case in point may be seen in how a range of social problems, from drugs and gambling to domestic abuse and diabetes, is presented and managed through the prism of CMIO. This is ritually manifest in targeted public speeches, media representations and group-specific programmes. Long-term ethnographic fieldwork, particularly among those identified as Malays, reveals a contradictory interplay of complicity and resistance to how target groups are imagined, described and acted upon. They serve to mobilize the group into existence and action but also raise challenges to policy assumptions about “the Malays” and their problems.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I argue that, by convincing so-called Care Avoiders to accept available services, and by convincing service providers to accept clients they previously refused, frontline social workers in the Netherlands carry out the labour of temporarily stabilizing an otherwise unstable world
Paper long abstract:
In the Netherlands, policy makers take so-called Care-Avoiders to be both ‘at risk’ and ‘risky’: at risk because they are prone to suffering and a premature death, and risky because they cause nuisance and may turn violent towards the people around them, including professionals. In 2023/2024, I conducted fieldwork in a team of social and mental healthcare workers charged with convincing care avoiders to accept the services made available to them. I found that, while trying to seduce, pressure, and coerce their clients into becoming care-accepting citizens, they were careful not to pathologize them. Instead, they presented clients as the victims of a ‘careless’ and ‘out of control’ system, while theorizing the use of violence by both care avoiders and police and healthcare professionals as the logical consequence of that system. In fact, reading the situation as such, they spent much of their time urging fellow frontline workers to become 'caring' and 'controlling' professionals, while also trying to undo the current mental healthcare system, in favor of a system rooted in existing ecologies of care. I describe these efforts to suggest that to classify is to temporarily stabilize an otherwise unstable world, or, in other words, to establish a social order.
Paper short abstract:
Public policy practitioners in Dutch municipalities experience a taboo on the formulation of target groups. Residents who are marginalized by (intersecting) forms of power are expected to be served by mainstreamed policies. Which values and affects do these mainstreamed policies bring into motion?
Paper long abstract:
Local bureaucrats who work for Dutch city administrations to roll out so-called “diversity policies” in municipalities experience a “taboo” on so-called “target group policies.” Because targeted interventions for specific audiences is constructed as irreconcilable with the principle of equality and with the need for social cohesion between groups, such diversity policies—paradoxically—need to be “for everybody.” This means that (what are thought of as) specific interest of (what are thought of as) specific marginalized groups are hoped to be addressed in mainstream policies that apply to all residents. Targeted interventions in "diversity policies" are even framed as being “not inclusive,” and local bureaucrats are anxious to be seen as prioritising certain groups over others. “No more targeted policies” operates as a “mantra” that circulates in city administrations. Bureaucrats are only given permission to go ahead with diversity policies “as long as these policies do not take the form targeted interventions.”
Based on long-term fieldwork in Dutch municipalities, this contribution aims to engage with the interplay between policies and publics in "diversity policies." It examines the bureaucratic imperative to classify and the implications of this imperative for inhabiting institutional identities. It brings forward complexities within within policy practices by investigating the values and affects that mainstreamed policies bring into motion. It demonstrates how intersectionality clashes with policy silos, how the room to maneuver of public administrators is safeguarded by open policy concepts, and how these categories of difference lead to paradoxical and internally contradictory arrangements that bureaucrats and residents ‘dance’ around.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research I historically and discursively analyse diversity policy development in higher education in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to show how ambiguous and multiple uses and wordings come about in diversity definitions.
Paper long abstract:
"A school where everyone feels welcome, regardless of their cultural, socioeconomic background, sexuality, gender, age, possibilities, talents, etc." The aim for an inclusive university in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where my ethnographic fieldwork took place, seems clear. However, a closer look into the included definitions of diversity and inclusivity reveals several ambiguities and unclarities. Who is the "everyone" referred to in the aim, if it needs clarification by a "regardless"? How did the selection of personal characteristics, from ethnicities to talents, develop in relation to the intended recipients? From where did a welcome feeling stem and whereto is it directed? Based on document analysis and interviews with policy advisors and other university key actors I want to describe how the multidirectional definitions of diversity came about and how they work out in the university's policy field. By historically and discursively analyzing diversity policy developments in this educational institution I hope to contribute to current understandings and workings of diversity definitions in higher education, Rotterdam, the Netherland and beyond.