Paper short abstract

The paper shows how the firm categories of socialist-era ethnic classification persist amid fluid interactions among postsocialist China, Vietnam and Kazakhstan. The work of state ethnologist-bureaucrats over many decades thus continues to shape cross-border experiences of the ‘rise of China’.

Paper long abstract

The twentieth century building of state socialism in Eurasia entailed a multifaceted categorisation of people unprecedented in scale and ambition. Alongside ‘class’, ethnicity (sometimes ‘nationality’) became a central pillar of the new revolutionary order in states such as the USSR, China and Vietnam, enshrined through a vast bureaucratic-ideological operation as state ethnologists fanned out into former imperial “frontiers” to identify and classify the peoples living there. Despite dramatic sociopolitical and economic changes since the 1990s, ethnonyms enshrined during these classificatory processes continue to carry important political weight today in China, Vietnam and various post-Soviet countries, appearing on ID cards and serving as key pivots in citizens’ interactions with their states.

Drawing on a wider ethnographic project on the afterlives of high modernist classification projects, this paper focuses on the persistent hardness of ‘ethnicity’ as a bureaucratic category under otherwise more fluid ‘postsocialist’ conditions, particularly in Vietnam and Kazakhstan in the context of the storied ‘rise of China’. In an era of massive flows of capital, people and goods across China’s borders, the categories of socialist ethnic classification seem anomalous extrusions, cloaked in the 'rigid polarities and flat totalisations' (Berman 1982) of twentieth-century modernity. Yet states’ ongoing investment in these categories, including through the activities of bureaucrat-anthropologists in official ethnological institutions, reveals how ideas about the ‘nation’ are also at stake as new currents of economic and political power radiate from China. This should be of concern to all anthropologists of politics and the state in many global locations.

Paper short abstract

‘Legal residence seeker’ is employed as a relational analytic that resists state-imposed categories, foregrounds migrant agency in struggles over legitimacy and recognition in Portugal, underscores a relationship with the state, and destabilises citizen/noncitizen lived experiences and distinctions.

Paper long abstract

The statement “I am no longer a refugee,” made by a rejected asylum-seeker in Portugal, encapsulates the struggles over legitimacy and recognition that characterise migration governance, and foregrounds the intricate interplay between normative and analytical categories in migration scholarship. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2024 in Portugal, the paper elucidates the strategies migrants employ - sometimes in partnership with, and sometimes in opposition to, legal and bureaucratic recommendations - as they navigate the shifting terrain of normative categorisation. Doing ethnographic justice to these processes requires careful navigation of analytical tensions: steering between a focus on the dynamic relationship between individuals and the state, and a focus on the analytical category of collective migrant identity - whether as noncitizens, illegalised or racialised migrants. While both approaches enable critique of migration governance practices that deny individuals legal and social recognition, the paper argues that privileging relationships allows for greater analytical manoeuvre between normative and analytical categories, blurring boundaries between citizen and noncitizen experiences. Yet how to avoid reproducing state logics when categories cannot be dispensed with altogether? As one scholar remarked about race as a social construct, “I still wake up Black every morning.” What light does the equivalent of waking up undocumented shed on the use of our analytical categories? The paper proposes the ‘legal residence seeker’ as a relational analytic that resists state-imposed categories, foregrounds migrant agency in struggles over legitimacy and recognition, underscores a relationship with the state, and destabilises citizen/noncitizen lived experiences and distinctions.

Paper short abstract

Accra’s Sanitation Taskforce and Court classify residents as “sanitation offenders”, “bad citizens”, or redeemable subjects when ordinary nuisances become infractions. As officials and residents co-produce urban hygiene, sanitation enforcement becomes a moralized arena where citizenship is sorted.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how urban residents in Accra are classified in the everyday work of Ghana’s Sanitation Taskforce and the Sanitation Court. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with public health inspectors and sanitation guards of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, it traces how ordinary nuisances such as blocked drains, lack of toilets, or informal vending are transformed into infractions, and how those deemed responsible become “sanitation offenders”, “bad citizens”, or, conversely, redeemable subjects. Classification here is not only technical but deeply moral: through house‑to‑house inspections, abatement notices, undertakings, and compulsory training sessions, officers distinguish between residents who “can learn” and those whose “stubbornness” warrants arrest and judicialization.

These categories travel to the Sanitation Court, where prosecutors multiply or drop charges, and where infractions may be recoded as administrative mishaps or elevated into cases “to set the example”. The attitude of the accused is considered by the judge, allowing them to explicitly separate the “redeemable” ones from others. Across this trajectory, residents occupy shifting positions in their interactions with city officials, from patients of public health expertise to environmental hazards and patriotic contributors to urban modernity.

By looking at city officials and residents as coproducers of urban hygiene, the paper argues that sanitation enforcement is a site where citizenship is classified, moralized, and eventually contested. This perspective speaks to broader dilemmas of bureaucratic categorization, showing how attempts to “civilize” the city through sanitary norms also reproduce inequalities in whose practices become visible, punishable, or forgivable.

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Bucharest, this paper shows how mortgage brokers navigate between enforcing and subverting algorithm-based classifications, revealing shared dilemmas of discretion, legitimacy, and exclusion across state and financial bureaucracies.

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Bucharest mortgage brokerage, this presentation examines how brokers navigate the friction between algorithmic risk categories and clients’ lived economic situations. Although located outside formal state institutions, mortgage brokers act as frontline bureaucrats of financialised governance, translating heterogeneous lives into categories legible to mortgage lenders based on state infrastructures of knowledge and moral deservingness.

The paper shows how classification operates as a technique of risk translation and future governance. State baked categories such as permanent employment, self-employment, marital status, pregnancy, and disability function as moralised proxies for responsibility, stability, and attachment, while routinely failing to capture contemporary forms of labour precarity and family life. Brokers and clients collaboratively negotiate these classificatory constraints through strategic timing, narrative reframing, and legal reconfigurations, or the redistribution of property rights, revealing bureaucratic categories as unstable, inhabited, and politically consequential. By tracing how state categories circulate, harden, and are informally reworked within private credit markets, the paper highlights shared epistemic dilemmas faced by brokers and state bureaucrats alike: how to exercise discretion under audit, how to justify deviations from rigid frameworks, and how to manage the ethical discomfort of exclusions known to be arbitrary. The analysis contributes to anthropological debates on bureaucracy by extending them beyond formal state offices, showing how bureaucratic power is enacted through financial infrastructures that govern access to housing, debt, and future security.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how age categories reshape access and distribution in a South African workfare programme. Amid bureaucratic efforts to prioritise youth, ethnographers must balance differentiating participants’ aspirations against emphasising shared needs for income security across age groups.

Paper long abstract

Welfare is a key domain in which bureaucratic differentiation becomes salient, as categories mediate access to material benefits and sanctions. In post-apartheid South Africa, a formally deracialised welfare system remains strongly productivist, despite widespread unemployment. For those deemed able to work, accessing income support requires them to labour on public work projects.

Drawing on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork within one public work programme, this paper examines how the bureaucratic category of youth (aged 18 - 35) emerged as a priority target group, and the dilemmas its application produced for bureaucrats and the researcher alike. Although this programme offered exceptionally low stipends, it also permitted long-term participation, effectively acknowledging the need for ongoing income support. Largely avoided by youth, it sustained mostly older participants. Often enrolled for many years, they derided their “stuckness”. Still, reflecting higher-up directives, recruitment and training opportunities were largely restricted to youth. Locally, this required managers to exclude older participants, even as the willingness of youth to work and rigid age boundaries were questioned.

Over time, these distinctions hardened amid fiscal pressures and the looming threat of unionisation. Policy changes effectively affirmed desires for mobility but particularised them to youth, for whom programme exit rather than formalisation as public-sector employees was envisaged. And they de-emphasised the shared need for income security across age groups, including those cobbling together livelihoods through multiple public schemes. This paper argues that differentiation enables divergent political projects. In the present context, ethnographic commitments to nuance may need to be weighed against universalism.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the binary of active vs. passive parenting functioned as a bureaucratic and moral category in a Berlin "intercultural" welfare center, and how, through everyday ethical encounters with a welfare professional, it produced conditional belonging and withdrawal among mothers.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the bureaucratic binary of “active” versus “passive” parents functioned as a category of moral and administrative classification in a Berlin “intercultural” parent-child center. Although the center was formally a voluntary space of leisure and play, its director faced pressure to align activities with municipal integration goals and funding expectations. Highlighting her role as a bureaucratic actor, she promoted the social work paradigm of parent activation (Elternaktivierung), interpreted as visible civic participation and one-on-one parenting engagement. A directive to “actively play” with children, a sign-up sheet to run a coffee counter, and spatial restrictions that excluded “inactive” parents from shared areas all worked to differentiate families into moral types and posited some families as obstructive to the center’s aim. A tight-knit group of Palestinian-German mothers resisted being classified as passive parents, and insisted on the value of informal sociality and a relational ethic of care. Yet, the moral weight of the director’s judgments shaped how they came to experience the center, and the activation policy resulted in a sense of conditional belonging and withdrawal. I analyze how bureaucratic categorization works through situated moral evaluations, where people are judged, approved of, or dismissed, and their sense of personhood and recognition is at stake. The paper argues that the social life of activation categories is inseparable from perceived moral authority and recognition.

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tajikistan, this paper examines how migration bureaucracy represents labor migrants to Russia. It analyzes how officials frame migrants’ “problems” and “risks,” producing a coherent figure shaped by colonial and racialized assumptions.

Paper long abstract

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, labor migration from Central Asia (particularly Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan) to Russia has become a widespread and enduring livelihood strategy, enabled by visa-free mobility within the post-Soviet space. Over the past three decades, this mobility has become deeply embedded in local economies and accompanied by the expansion of migration bureaucracies, shaped both by state institutions and international agencies seeking to regulate and “order” migration. Central to this bureaucratic labor is the production of the migrant as a governable subject.

Bureaucracy is not only a site of regulation and conflict but also of conceptual labor, where epistemic coherence about migrants and their “problems” is produced and maintained. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with migration bureaucracy in Tajikistan, this paper examines the politics of representation through which migrants are institutionally understood. It asks how widely accepted assumptions about migrants’ needs, risks, and vulnerabilities come to be framed as objective truths within official discourse.

Through analysis of officials’ speeches, documents, and everyday interactions, the paper explores how a diverse and fragmented bureaucratic landscape nonetheless produces a coherent and unitary figure of the migrant. Attending to colonial and racializing legacies embedded in migration governance. It shows how labor conditions in Russia, combined with ascribed ethnicity, contribute to representations of Tajik migrants as inherently unprepared. By foregrounding bureaucratic practices of representation, the paper highlights how migration governance shapes not only policy outcomes but also dominant ways of knowing migrant subjects.