Log in to star items.
- Convenors:
-
Lieke Wissink
(University of Applied Sciences Inholland University of Amsterdam)
Emma Lengle (University of Oslo)
Alexandra Oancă (KU Leuven)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Lieke van der Veer
(Delft University of Technology)
- Discussant:
-
Insa Koch
(University of Sankt Gallenis)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
While Institutional Whiteness has gained interdisciplinary attention, its everyday workings in European state settings remain ethnographically underexplored. Addressing this lacuna, this panel gathers anthropological studies into state practices that attend to Institutional Whiteness across Europe.
Long Abstract
This panel addresses the need for more ethnographic and contextual insight into the everyday workings of Whiteness within institutional cultures across Europe. Whereas anthropologists have ethnographically attended to what critical race scholars have coined Institutional Whiteness, this was mostly done in the context of the US (e.g. Bridges 2011; Shange 2020). While anthropological studies on state practices that are situated in Europe have convincingly shown how forms of governance imagine those who are racialized as non-White outside of sociality and how the racialization of non-Whiteness takes shape in institutional cultures, further insight is needed into the (re)production of Whiteness as dialectical counterpart therein. We therefore welcome papers based on ethnographic research across Europe that advance insight into how, where, why and by what or whom Whiteness gets (re)produced. We are also interested in processes that render Institutional Whiteness implicit and normative – such as colorblindness, white ignorance, and white habitus formations. We seek to collect papers in a wide range of state-saturated sites, including (but not limited to) state bureaucracy, EU policymaking, urban governance, social policy, welfare regimes, and postcolonial advocacy. Our overall aim is to bring forward situated occurrences of Whiteness and to identify how and where it operates as an institutional norm – considering postcolonial and postsocialist European contexts. We hope to collectively advance anthropological knowledge on (histories of) contemporary European Institutional Whiteness and the inequalities, polarizations and power dynamics that it generates.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes institutional whiteness through ethnographic research with public officials in Marseille’s banlieues. It shows how colorblind norms, participatory policies, and racialized interactions produce discomfort and self-doubt, contributing to institutional forms of white fragility.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the fragilization of institutional whiteness (Ahmed 2007) through the everyday practices of public officials working in French banlieues. It draws on six months of ethnographic fieldwork with agents responsible for implementing so-called participatory welfare policies in several neighborhoods of Marseille (France), where poor and immigrant residents are concentrated. The study is based on more than twenty interviews with municipal and metropolitan project managers occupying diverse racialized positions, as well as observations of formal meetings and informal interactions with residents, documented through ethnographic drawings focusing on bodies, practices, and spatial arrangements.
First, the paper shows how project managers are caught between a French colorblind context (Mazouz 2021) and circulating activist critiques of race, generating internal tensions over their differentiated legitimacy to intervene in such neighborhoods. It then analyzes how the “new” participatory funding mechanisms they mobilize can be interpreted as strategies to distance themselves from the image of a contemptuous and racist institution that haunts their professional identities. Finally, close observation of encounters between those officials, community partners, and residents reveals patterns of avoidance, discomfort, and emerging injunctions that shape the multiple ways in which these project managers (struggle to) embody the state in their neighborhood encounters.
By examining the emergence of whiteness-related discomfort and its effects on state action in the French postcolonial context, this paper contributes more broadly to extending the analysis of ‘white fragility’ (DiAngelo 2018) to the institutional level.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes Polish aid programs as tools for Romani racialization and "institutional whiteness." Ethnographic data shows how state assistance reinforces ethnic divides while ignoring class and religious shifts, cementing the Roma as the "Other" within a super-homogeneous nation-state.
Paper long abstract
This paper investigates how state-led assistance programs in Poland, ostensibly designed to support marginalized minorities, function as mechanisms of racialization and the reproduction of "Institutional Whiteness." Drawing on long-term ethnographic research among Roma communities in Wrocław and Bystrzyca Kłodzka, I analyze how aid distributed along "ethnic lines" reinforces the image of the Roma as a permanent "Other" within a super-homogeneous society, where 96% of the population declares an exclusive Polish identity.
I argue that Polish institutional practices operate within a "white habitus" that conflates Polishness with Catholicism and specific class performances. When the state intervenes through ethnic-targeted programs, it often essentializes the community, fixing it in a rigid, racialized category while ignoring internal class dynamics and the transformative role of religious shifts, such as the Roma conversion to Pentecostalism. This "racializing gaze" of the state became particularly visible during the 2022 refugee crisis, where the selective mobilization of solidarity further exposed the boundaries of institutional whiteness and the "Pole-Catholic" myth.
By examining the friction between state-sponsored aid, class exclusion, and changing religious identities, this paper contributes to the understanding of how European state settings produce "difference." I suggest that as long as assistance is predicated on essentialist ethnic categories, it will continue to alienate those it claims to help, maintaining whiteness as the invisible, normative center of the Polish nation-state. This study calls for a re-evaluation of how "inclusion" policies might inadvertently deepen racialized divisions.
Paper short abstract
From Europe’s rhetoric of green exemplarity to ordinary exemptions, what is the role of environmental norms in reproducing whiteness? Drawing on ethnographic research with farmers, from protests to everyday accounting practices, I examine how the racial contract is (re)negotiated in times of crisis.
Paper long abstract
“French farmers are food leaders, not dealers”: these words were posted on Facebook during a protest organized by Coordination Rurale, a rising far-right farmers’ union, in June 2025. In response to the so-called “police of the environment” checking their farms, farmers denounced the criminalization of their practices, claiming they are legitimate and dedicated to the nation’s food sovereignty. In 2024, the Prime Minister raised a similar concern, questioning the necessity for biodiversity inspectors to carry firearms, calling the practice “humiliating” for farmers.
In this paper, I propose to examine farmers’ political demands and relationships with the French State – and to some extent, the European Union – through the lens of institutional whiteness (Ahmed 2012). By claiming that they are not “dealers” and by displaying fraternal solidarity with the (regular) police instead, I argue that farmers are turning their whiteness into an argument to benefit from special treatments by state officials. Drawing on ethnographic research with cereal farmers, I analyze how the conditions of the racial contract (Mills 1997) are (re)negotiated in times of market crises and conflicts over environmental rules, from recent farmers’ protests to everyday environmental accounting practices.
Building on studies that have highlighted the limited power of the French “police of the environment” (Magnin, Rouméas & Basier 2024), I will explore (1) the specific position of farmers within the French State and the European Union, and (2) the ambivalent role of environmental norms in the reproduction of whiteness, from the rhetoric of ecological exemplarity to ordinary exemptions.
Paper short abstract
Through 14 months of ethnography in the City of Oslo, I trace how colorblind “for everyone” policies and geography‑based interventions in public health governance organize the everyday workings of Institutional Whiteness, reproducing a white, middle‑class norm of health.
Paper long abstract
This paper offers an ethnography of the everyday workings of Institutional Whiteness in a Nordic welfare state, specifically how it is reproduced through public health governance in the City of Oslo. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork with civil servants and politicians as they negotiated and crafted a ten‑year strategy to reduce “social inequality in health,” I approach the City of Oslo as a site where bureaucratic routines and moral imaginaries intersect.
The City of Oslo does not systematically collect health data by race or ethnicity. Instead, health inequity is rendered through predominantly socioeconomic “gradients” and area‑based urban policies. Policymakers acknowledge that references to geography carry racialized undertones, yet worry that naming race will fuel division or reify stereotypes. Policy targets are formulated around “alle” (everyone), and interventions are justified through place rather than racialized categories. Drawing on meetings, workshops, consultation processes, interviews and strategy documents, I show how colorblind universalism organizes the everyday workings of Whiteness (Ahmed 2012), making a white norm operative yet difficult to name.
Building on Nancy Krieger’s notion of the “two‑edged sword” of data and Anouk de Koning’s concept of the haunted universal, I argue that the City of Oslo’s universalism is similarly double‑edged. It camouflages racialized hierarchies by collapsing multiple axes of oppression into class, measured through socioeconomic status, even as policymakers prefigure welfare futures where “everyone” is imagined to flourish.
The paper situates Nordic welfare universalism as a key site for ethnographic study of Institutional Whiteness in contemporary European state practice.
Paper short abstract
In France, Afghan asylum seekers are expected to demonstrate “westernization” during their court hearings. I focus on “westernization’s” nebulousness and the ambivalent feelings it elicits to reflect on norms of whiteness and the legitimization of Islamophobia in the asylum seeking process.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the concept of “westernization” (“occidentalisation” in French) as it is deployed in hearings of Afghan men at the National Court of Asylum in the Paris region. In addition to proving they have faced political persecution in their country of origin, Afghan men are expected to demonstrate that they have adopted “western” lifestyles and values incompatible with the Taliban regime that would put them at risk of government repression if they returned to Afghanistan.
In early 2026, an official court decision emphasized that learning French and volunteering – two activities that asylum seekers can mention to show they are “westernized” – do not suffice to prove “occidentalisation”. No standard definition of “westernization” exists, but during court hearings, questions frequently center on asylum seekers’ relationship with Islam and opinions about women’s place in society.
Building on long-term fieldwork at the French National Court of Asylum in the Paris region observing audiences of male Afghan immigrants, as well as interviews with asylum seekers, lawyers and judges, I delineate the contours of “westernization” as an Islamophobic concept used to scrutinize Afghan Muslims’ conformity to a nebulous set of behaviors and values that can best be defined as “whiteness”. I focus on the affective valence of lawyers’ and judges’ engagement with “westernization”, showing how expressions of discomfort and uncertainty performatively exonerate the construction of whiteness through the abjection of Islam, often in the name of protecting women’s rights.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic research with employers and recruitment agencies in Romania, this paper examines how Institutional Whiteness is reproduced in labour recruitment from Southeast Asia through seemingly neutral criteria such as discipline, cultural fit, and adaptability.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the everyday reproduction of Whiteness in labour regimes in post-socialist Europe. Drawing on qualitative interviews in construction, hospitality, and recruitment sectors, the paper examines how Whiteness operates as an implicit institutional norm shaping ideas of employability, integration, and “good work,” while remaining largely unspoken. Rather than being articulated through explicit racial categories, Whiteness emerges through seemingly neutral institutional criteria such as work ethic, discipline, cultural compatibility, hygiene, adaptability, and non-conflictuality. These criteria function as normative benchmarks against which Asian workers are evaluated and managed, while European norms of work, communication, and embodiment remain unmarked and universalized. Recruitment agencies play a key mediating role in translating racialized assumptions into technical, legal, and managerial practices, including screening procedures, cultural profiling, and narratives of suitability tied to hierarchy and compliance.
Situated in a post-socialist European context often framed as racially neutral and peripheral to colonial histories, the paper shows how Institutional Whiteness is reproduced through colorblind governance and pragmatic justifications related to labour shortages and market efficiency. Asian workers are constructed as temporary, compliant, and socially invisible solutions to structural labour gaps, while Whiteness functions as the taken-for-granted standard of sociality and professionalism. By approaching labour recruitment as a state-saturated ethnographic site where migration policy, market logics, and moral economies intersect, the paper demonstrates how racialized inequalities are sustained through ordinary institutional practices that present Whiteness as a taken-for-granted standard of sociality and professionalism, while shifting the burden of adaptation, endurance, and persistence onto migrant workers.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how settings in Swiss integration promotion reproduce institutional whiteness through an affective economy of positivity. It shows how this affective economy forecloses discussions about racist structures and institutional inequalities, thereby reproducing racial hierarchies.
Paper long abstract
Debates around migration and integration are deeply racialised, yet often framed as neutral efforts to foster cohesion, equality, and inclusion. This paper examines how settings in integration promotion in Switzerland reproduce institutional whiteness and racial hierarchies through an affective economy (Ahmed 2004, Fortier 2010). Based on ethnographic research of state-affiliated educational workshops for volunteers, I analyse how whiteness operates through an affective economy of positivity. In these workshops, racism appears in workshop materials and in interactions but is consistently unnamed or positively reframed. Drawing on feminist affect theory (Hemmings 2012, Guschke 2023), I use my own affective trajectories as a racially privileged researcher to trace how comfort, ease, and humour are cultivated, while discomfort or anger are excluded. I argue that this affective economy of positivity reproduces institutional whiteness in these settings: It secures comfort, and security for those not subjected to racialisation, while discomfort or anger related to racism and racist inequalities are excluded or stopped. By situating these dynamics within Switzerland’s post-racial discourse (Boulila 2019), the paper shows how institutional whiteness is reproduced through an affective economy that prevents from talking about racist structures and from dealing with institutional inequalities. The contribution speaks to anthropological debates on the reproduction of whiteness through institutional and everyday interactions in contemporary Europe.