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- Convenors:
-
Kelly McKowen
(Princeton University)
Synnøve Bendixsen (University of Bergen)
John Borneman (Princeton University)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-B307
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how the relationship between thin and thick notions of social incorporation shapes--and is shaped by--the experiences of migrants with the policies, laws, institutions, and customs of contemporary European welfare states.
Long Abstract:
The 2004 and 2007 eastern enlargements of the European Union, as well as the 2015-2016 refugee crisis, have catalyzed and intensified flows of labor migrants and asylum-seekers to western and northern European welfare states. For these countries, a growing presence of migrants poses challenges of social incorporation. There are many "thin" notions of incorporation: learning a cultural script; acquiring legal, economic, and cultural rights to membership, extending the traditional understanding of citizenship to social categories (e.g., post-national, post-cultural); or the cultivation of common values or virtues such as "mutual respect." A thicker notion would mean not simply becoming a subject who possesses rights or values like those of longer-term residents but also creating a sense of "mutual belonging" oriented toward new, shared categories of identification. This panel explores how the relationship between these two notions of incorporation shapes--and is shaped by--the experiences of migrants with the policies, laws, institutions, and customs of contemporary European welfare states. How is the extension or restriction of social citizenship framed by local metaphors of incorporation--(for example, ingestion, indigestion, disgust, fusion, combination, affiliation, appropriation, encompassment)? How do different modes of (re)distribution inflect processes and possibilities of belonging? With respect to incorporation, what do extant concepts--such as plurality, multiculturalism, civic integration, assimilation, integration, or alternately, fragmentation and disintegration--contribute to framing and understanding emergent forms of sociality? This panel engages these questions and develops "social incorporation" as a conceptual tool for understanding the variable tension between thin and thick notions of incorporation in contemporary Europe.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore how parenting in a Norwegian urban neighbourhood is informed by diversification and certain ideals such as sameness and equality. How and why are parents trying to create an 'inclusive' neighbourhood? How are they in this process dealing with difference?
Paper long abstract:
This paper will explore how parenting in a Norwegian urban neighbourhood is informed by diversification and certain ideals such as sameness and equality. Through fieldwork and interviews with parents of various class and ethnic background, the paper will discuss how everyday encounters with difference are constituted. These everyday encounters are framed as if much is at stake, such as creating a desirable childhood environment and future opportunities of their children.
We will discuss the tensions that exist between pursuing an inclusive society, domesticating difference and creating "mutual belonging" in a diversified neighbourhood. Two main aspects of social incorporation that takes place in these encounters will be emphasized: first, the parents seek to incorporate difference in their parenting practices. They do so by providing value to certain forms of difference that is framed as characteristic of Other people. Second, in these encounters, some parents intervene through specific middle-class ideals, virtues and practices regarding parenting and upbringing and how to live together. There is an effort to create inclusion and "mutual belonging" in the neighborhood through generating similar practices on child upbringing.
We call these practices by the parents a politics of inclusion, through which difference is both accentuated and domesticated. We explore how certain virtues and values, such as equality and sameness, and some practices and rituals, such as birthday parties and voluntary work, are fronted as important to learn and pursue in order for newcomers to be incorporated in the Norwegian society.
Paper short abstract:
Refugees are specific objects of research for anthropologists, and displaced people in flight for the welfare state. They place demands on the anthropologist to be a "container" for their emotional messages, and on the welfare state to function as a holding environment.
Paper long abstract:
Refugees are specific objects of research for anthropologists, and are encountered as displaced people in flight for the welfare state. They place demands on the anthropologist to be a "container" for their emotional messages, and on the welfare state to function as a "holding environment." This paper suggests the inadequacy of the usual frames of witnessing or participant observation if one relates to refugees in interlocution-based fieldwork. A more appropriate frame may be "containment", where one is asked to perform the function of container to the emotional messages. Furthermore, people in flight seek a holding environment in which they feel secure and can develop a capacity to care for themselves and others. Among different state forms, the northern European welfare state comes closest to promising this holding environment, hence it is has become the preferred destination of most of the world's refugees. Its promise to sustain this type of environment for its residents is often perceived as in conflict with extending this environment to people in flight. The anthropologist, in turn, is located in this environment not as a neutral witness or observer but either as one who extracts information or as a potential facilitator. This paper explores these issues with respect to Syrian refugees in Germany.
Paper short abstract:
Egyptian migrant mothers construe a sense of belonging to a state of welfare rights in the city of Milan. Although the welfare has few resources, state professionals and the system of distribution inherently induce them to think so. I explore how their sense of belonging and entitlement take shape.
Paper long abstract:
During the months leading up to the eviction of her family, Amal, although she felt tensed, was strongly convinced that social care professionals at the Eviction Center in Milan, would find a solution for her. While they explained it to her more than once that they could not, she read a strategy in their words to undermine excessive demands. Eventually, when the eviction took place, she and her children were offered to be hosted in a facility far from Milan. She was outraged by the inability of the system to find a feasible housing solution, that she had hoped for. She angrily argued that she had the right to it.
This paper explores the formation of sense of belonging to a state of welfare rights, in the way Egyptian migrant mothers envision it. Based on twelve months of observations of their encounters with state professionals, welfare workers and volunteers, I reflect, departing from Amal case, on how migrant mothers are persuaded that they are entitled to specific rights - a thought which they have matured over time in Italy, which is utterly incongruent on what is available to them. How then their expectations take shape and rest solid among most of them? How the sense of belonging to a state of rights is born in a state that has few welfare resources? To disentangle this conundrum, I explore the dynamics of a state that claims it lacks the resources and, at the same time, is strongly committed to show solidarity.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes how newcomers become part of a local community. I explore what meeting arenas exist, structured and spontaneous, and what role both civil society organizations and the welfare state, through the boroughs, take on to promote such arenas for interaction and community development.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes dynamics of incorporation and belonging at a neighbourhood and city level to explore how newcomers (particularly immigrants and refugees) come to be, and feel, part of the local community. I explore what meeting arenas exist, structured and spontaneous, and what role both civil society organizations (such as NGOs) and the welfare state, through administrative structures at the level of the boroughs, play in promoting such arenas for interaction and community development. I do so on the basis of an ethnographic study of arenas (spaces and activities) that facilitate interaction at a neighbourhood and city-level in Oslo, Norway. This includes activities that are explicitly aimed at incorporating immigrants in the community (e.g. language cafés) and others where people of different backgrounds simply meet based on a shared interest (e.g. gardening). I explore, on the one hand, attitudes to and engagement with refugee and immigrant reception among members of the "host" community, looking at how ideas about community, otherness and inclusion shape attitudes to newcomers, and whether these evolve through spontaneous encounters and participation in shared activities. I also address how recently arrived immigrants and refugees themselves experience being part of a new community, how they seek to interact with the established population and what obstacles and positive experiences they meet in this process. I discuss the relationship between spontaneous interaction and participation in structured activities, that is, for instance, whether individuals seek out structured activities as a complement, alternative, or way into unstructured forms of hospitality and interaction.
Paper short abstract:
The erotic as site of xenophilia and xenophobia
Paper long abstract:
The erotic dimension of foreigner incorporation: Encounters between Germans and Syrian refugees today.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses how the everyday encounters of refugees, migrants, and minorities with Finnish policies and institutions in a working-class suburban context are, in response to the state driven myopia regarding the diversity of migratory pathways and histories, characterised by estrangement.
Paper long abstract:
By employing the concept of 'estrangement', this paper analyses the everyday encounters of migrants and ethnic minorities with a intensely state-driven regime of care in what is an archetypal European welfare state: Finland. Due to being historically outside the scope of the post-war labour migrations, or at the very least being very much the country of outbound migration until the 1980s, the hegemonic, state-sanctioned, Finnish narrative of migration has been that of asylum-seeking. This narrative has engendered bureaucratic imaginaries, processes, and policies which, by default, treat the vast majority of arrivals from outside the European Union as traumatised, poor, suspicious, and passive. For many residents of non-majority origin, descent, or identification ̶ refugees, migrants, ethnic or linguistic minorities, and labourers ̶ this means that the internal diversity of what the Finnish policies and institutions seek to manage is never fully acknowledged. There is a tension between not only 'thin' and 'thick' notions of social incorporation, but also between the practiced terminological division of 'incorporation' and 'integration', captured in Finnish by the term kotoutuminen, derived from the word koti, 'home'.
Based on participatory observation in Varissuo, a diverse working-class suburb in Turku, Finland, this paper argues that among its residents, the relationship to social incorporation, and Finnish legal and political institutions is characterised by estrangement. Estrangement differs from alienation as an active practice of not engaging with the institutions in the expected terms and as an critique to the bureaucratic metastasis of a refugee camp imaginary into everyday urban life.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the ways migrants interpret, accede to, and resist a shared ethos of statist individualism.
Paper long abstract:
The Scandinavian welfare states are distinguished not only by particular redistributive institutions but by a distinctive shared ethos that integrates high trust in the state with the aspiration to individual autonomy. Swedish scholars Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh describe this unique ethical orientation as "statist individualism," and suggest that it underpins a seemingly counterintuitive arrangement that makes comprehensive state intervention the preferred means to individual freedom and well-being. While a discussion of statist individualism is essential to any exhaustive account of culture in contemporary Scandinavia, however, it has yet to feature prominently in the burgeoning scholarly literature on the social incorporation of migrants in the region. In this paper, I draw on more than a year of fieldwork among unemployed migrants in Oslo to describe the myriad ways non-natives encounter, interpret, evaluate, accede to, and resist social and active labor market policies animated by statist individualism. Highlighting these policies' role in reconfiguring relations of dependency to elevate the individual-state relationship above others, I argue that statist individualism should be seen not only as a common ethos that sustains Norway's welfare state but a common ethos produced by it. I conclude with thoughts on how an account of migrant encounters with statist individualism can be mobilized in order to challenge the reductive, but nevertheless powerful, rhetoric of welfare chauvinists who claim that migrant cultures and the ethos of the Norwegian welfare state are incompatible.
Paper short abstract:
The presentation focuses on the ways in which local officials and residents mobilize earlier experiences and conceptions of immigration-based diversity when assessing the potential future incorporation of asylum seekers in local neighborhoods. It draws on ethnographic research in two German cities.
Paper long abstract:
When Germany received large numbers of asylum seekers in 2015, politics and administrations needed to sideline many of their usual rules and procedures to make a quick initial reception possible. To date, it is unclear how this 'crisis mode' of initial asylum seeker reception informs the ways in which local officials and residents experienced the presence of asylum seekers and how they mobilized earlier experiences with immigration when contemplating their future social incorporation. Do they consider that mutual belonging of recent asylum seekers and established residents is possible? Large-scale studies show that a majority of Germans today is open to having refugees as their neighbors and do not associate problems with refugees in their neighborhood (Bertelsmann 2017). Yet, few small-scale studies have captured the concrete experiences and conceptions of residents and officials. Drawing on ethnographic data, my analysis highlights the disappointed expectations and broken promises the installation of asylum seeker reception centers represented for local residents and urban planners in a neighborhood in Frankfurt. While local officials as well as local populations otherwise had a largely welcoming attitude to the recent asylum seekers, the sidelining of their concerns and of bureaucratic rules created tensions and thereby undermined the cultivation of mutual belonging.
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork in Syria, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands and a unique personal 20-year old ethnographic film archive, this paper traces life histories of Syrian refugees and documents their experiences encountering people, institutions and customs of German and Dutch welfare states.
Paper long abstract:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Syria, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands and a unique personal 20-year old ethnographic film archive, this paper traces life histories of Syrian refugees in Germany and the Netherlands. The paper documents their experiences encountering people, institutions, culture and customs of German and Dutch welfare states. Based on interviews and participant observation, the chapter discusses everyday challenges and interaction of Syrian refugees with the Dutch asylum system, for example interactions with immigration agencies, asylum center organisations, refugee aid organisations, immigration lawyers, institutionalized integration programmes, educational institutions and members of the host societies. In particular, the paper describes the experiences of respondents between the ages of 17 and 48 of both genders, from three extended families from Aleppo and Raqqa province (northern Syria), with whom the author has built and developed rapport since she carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork between 2000 and 2002 in their village of origin. Going beyond the analysis of a thin notion of incorporation, the author, herself Dutch, analyses a thick notion of incorporation and integration, how are host communities transformed by the arrival of Syrian refugees and vice versa? She traces how the expectations and images that Syrian refugees had formed about the Netherlands and Germany in the far past, when she herself as a young anthropologist in Syria was culturally and socially incorporated into their traditional village and families, relate to their experiences of reality as refugees encountering the processes of bureaucratisation that marked their lives once they arrived.