Willem Schinkel
Biographic Data
| ID | 79539 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Willem Schinkel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Willem |
| FAMILY NAME | Schinkel |
| SIGNATURE | SCHINKEL W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8154-6245 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 912 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Instituting the global
In this article, we regard concepts of inclusion and exclusion as epistemological obstacles for a political (rather than a critical) analysis of migration. Working with the rich conceptual innovations and scientific and philosophical genealogies developed by Denise Ferreira Da Silva in Toward a Global Idea of Race, we seek to show how concepts of inclusion and exclusion, as well as equations between migration and mobility fortify what Da Silva ha…
The economy of migration. Knowledge, accounting, and debt
What we propose in this paper is to elaborate on what it means to consider 'migration' as part of an oikonomia. This is not an 'economic perspective on migration' but a genealogy of migration as a way of managing people in light of both colonial divides and questions of labor and race. First, we argue that 'migration' is constituted as an effect of accounting, of the registration of comings and goings and of belonging within a reference space of …
Steps to an Ecology of Algorithms
Anthropological expeditions seeking out algorithms frequently return empty-handed. They are confronted with the challenge of the object: what to study when studying algorithms? In this article, I draw together a number of literatures to outline one possible answer to the question of how to study algorithms in social science. I argue that what we should study are algorithmic ecologies. I sketch five modalities of algorithmic ecologies and review c…
To decolonize migration studies means to dismantle it. On Adrian Favell's The Integration Nation and question-ability
What might remain after the "decolonization of migration studies"? Nothing that could have to do anything with "migration". The contradictions of migration studies cannot be solved within its liberal parameters. To decolonize migration studies is to dismantle it
State work and the testing concours of citizenship
Anyone trying to be a citizen has to pass through a set of practices trying to be a state. This paper investigates some of the ways testing practices calibrate citizens, and in doing so, perform “the state.” The paper focuses on three forms of citizenship testing, which it considers exemplary forms of “state work,” and which all, in various ways, concern “migration.” First, the constitution of a “border crossing,” which requires an identity test …
Migration studies
This is a rejoinder to the responses made to my paper ‘Against “immigrant integration”: For an end to neocolonial knowledge production’, which was based on my book Imagined Societies. A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Here, I aim to push the boundaries of our discussion a bit further by arguing that the point is not to come up with better concepts of ‘immigrant integration’. Rather, it is to…
The raced constitution of Europe
Centering upon the first Europe-wide public opinion survey of racism, carried out by the Eurobarometer in 1988, this article explores how studying European public opinion research can shed light on what we call the raced constitution of Europe. Based on an analysis of this Eurobarometer survey, we scrutinize how Eurobarometer opinion polling involves a constant scale-switching through which ‘Europe’ and ‘racism’ are co-produced. As we argue, tech…
Autopoiesis
The concept of autopoiesis was coined by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to describe self‐organizing and self‐reproducing processes in the cells of biological organisms. Literally denoting self ( auto ) production ( poesis ), it denotes the way a biological cell consists of components that are produced by a structure they themselves help to maintain. In sociology, its most famous application has been given by Niklas Luhm…
Algorithmic anxiety
This paper discusses prominent examples of what we call "algorithmic anxiety" in artworks engaging with algorithms. In particular, we consider the ways in which artists such as Zach Blas, Adam Harvey and Sterling Crispin design artworks to consider and critique the algorithmic normativities that materialize in facial recognition technologies. Many of the artworks we consider center on the face, and use either camouflage technology or forms of mas…
Against ‘immigrant integration’
This paper, written on invitation by the editors of Comparative Migration Studies, is intended as a provocation piece for invited commentators, and more broadly for those working with, or concerned about, the field of immigrant integration research. It outlines an argument put forward in Imagined Societies. A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017) that 1) critiques immigrant integration research for…
The state's sexual desires
The facticity of sexuality is a key driver of the asylum procedure in “LGBT” cases, where non-heterosexual identities can be grounds for gaining” refugee status.” The procedure becomes a test of sexual veracity by means of a truthful performance. This performance is primarily discursive, but it is also bodily in terms of the way bodily comportment is considered indicative of a “true story.” Underlying this process is a conception of sexuality as …
Imagined Societies
In many countries in Western Europe, the demand for immigrant integration has inevitably raised questions about the 'societies' into which immigrants are asked to integrate. Imagined Societies critically intervenes in debates on immigrant integration and multiculturalism in Western Europe. Schinkel argues that the term 'multiculturalism' is not used primarily to describe a type of policy or political philosophy in countries such as the Netherland…
Imaginaries of postponed arrival
This paper discusses a logic of seeing in official assessments of the ‘integration of immigrants’ in West European societies and interprets these as arrival narratives. In postcolonial and diasporic literature, the arrival narrative is not concerned with the actual date of arrival but with the question ‘how much has someone really arrived?’ (Quayson, A. 2013. Postcolonialism and the diasporic imaginary. Lecture series: New directions in literary …
Surveillance at sea
The relationship between vision and action is a key element of both practices and conceptualizations of border surveillance in Europe. This article engages with what we call the 'operative vision' of surveillance at sea, specifically as performed by the border control apparatus in the Aegean. We analyse the political consequences of this operative vision by elaborating on three examples of fieldwork conducted in the Aegean and on the islands of C…
Drawing Lines, Enacting Migration
Migration cannot be readily seen. Yet the study of contemporary migration control and border management, particularly with respect to Europe, abounds in the use of ocular terminology, such as surveillance and monitoring. We approach these issues by asking how the visualization of border lines and their crossings is enacted. More specifically, we seek to conceptualize the visual infrastructure through which border lines and movement lines are draw…
Building Better Ecological Machines
Computer models of the economy are regularly used to predict economic phenomena and set financial policy. However, the conventional macroeconomic models are currently being reimagined after they failed to foresee the current economic crisis, the outlines of which began to be understood only in 2007-2008. In this article we analyze the most prominent of this reimagining: Agent-Based models (ABMs). ABMs are an influential alternative to standard ec…
Making climates comparable
This article foregrounds comparison as a key practice in science by discussing the case of chronological comparability in paleoclimatology. Based on an ethnographic study of a paleoclimate research project, I illustrate how paleoclimatologists are able to produce comparative data on and images of past climates through the use of 'proxies'. I focus on the calibration of a type of algae as a proxy for climate variables. Such comparability is one il…
The Language of Inclusion and Exclusion in Immigration and Integration
1. Introduction: the language of inclusion and exclusion in the context of immigration and integration Marlou Schrover and Willem Schinkel 2. The imagination of 'society' in measurements of immigrant integration Willem Schinkel 3. Bodies at the border: the medical protection of immigrants in a French immigration detention centre Nicolas Fischer 4. Spectacles of migrant 'illegality': the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion Nicholas De Gen…
The Legal Case File as Border Object
What do case files do? With help of an ethnographic study on the care, maintenance, and use of legal case files in a Dutch, inquisitorial context, we work through Latour's and Luhmann's conceptualizations of law. We understand these case files as enacting and performing both self‐reference and other‐reference. We coin the term border object to denote the way the legal case file becomes the nexus between two worlds it itself performatively produce…
The sociologist and the state. An assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology
This paper provides an assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology based on a reading of his posthumously published lectures on the state in Sur l'État. It argues that the state was a foundational element in Bourdieu's rendition of the symbolic order of everyday life. As such, the state becomes equally pivotal in Bourdieu's sociology, the applicability of which rests on the existence of the state, which stabilizes the social fields and their symbol…
The image of crisis
Crisis jargon has become endemic in modernity. Whether in radical or in affirmative versions, the idea that 'crisis' offers 'opportunity', in accordance with the meaning of crisis as 'decision', is widespread. This paper questions the relationship between modernity and crisis, first by highlighting the ways in which modernity itself has been cast as 'crisis': first as crisis of tradition, then as crisis of modernity itself. The main part of this …
Imagining society
This paper looks at how expert and scientific graphic images of immigrant integration in the Netherlands and Germany portray a distance between minority groups and a dominant imagination of society. It specifically explicates the ways "images of alterity" in assessments of immigrant integration are visually structured by means of a pictorial display of spatial markers of distance. It does so by means of a close examination of the visual expressio…
Crime, Citizenship and Community
This article discusses the emergence, in the field of crime and safety, of a formula of government that can be called neoliberal communitarianism. This is a paradoxical governmental strategy that combines a focus on 'individual responsibility', 'community' and a 'selectively tough state'. The discussion is based on the Foucaultian triangle of strategy, political programmes and techniques. The substance of this application consists of a discussion…
A genealogy of neoliberal communitarianism
This article investigates the power/knowledge relations between contemporary penal government and criminological theory. Based on an analysis of the strategic case of the Netherlands, the emergence of what can be called neoliberal communitarianism is discussed. In relation to the ‘penal welfarism’ it succeeds, neoliberal communitarianism provides a rationale of governing that allows a greater amount of complexity precisely because it consists of …
Regimes of Violence and the Trias Violentiae
In common-sense usage, violence is usually conceptualized as intentional physical harm. This makes violence identifiable, locatable, and it facilitates the governing of those identified as committing infractions upon the non-violent community. In this article it is illustrated how this conception of violence legitimates the state by blocking the state's own foundational violence from critical scrutiny. It argues that the liberal state rests on th…
Against ‘immigrant integration’
This paper, written on invitation by the editors of Comparative Migration Studies, is intended as a provocation piece for invited commentators, and more broadly for those working with, or concerned about, the field of immigrant integration research. It outlines an argument put forward in Imagined Societies. A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017) that 1) critiques immigrant integration research for…
The double helix of cultural assimilationism and neo-liberalism
In this article the recent transformations of citizenship in the Netherlands are analysed in relation to a developing form of governmentality. We regard citizenship as a state regulated technique of in- and exclusion and a crucial instrument in the management of populations. Taking the Dutch contexts of immigration and integration as our case, we argue that cultural assimilationism and neo-liberalism appear in a double helix: they combine to form…
Neoliberal communitarian citizenship
As Western European nation-states adapt to the challenges posed to the nation-state by globalization and immigration, adjusting citizenship criteria for immigrants has been one of the responses to these developments. This article compares the current changes in citizenship policies of three Western European states: the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands. The main concern of the article is to shed light on the emerging development of a for…
The imagination of 'society' in measurements of immigrant integration
My aim in this contribution is to clarify in which way social scientific measurements of immigrant integration operate as a form of 'social imagination', that is, of the routinized and professionalized visualization of social life. Through such measurements, images of 'society' are produced that feed into larger social imaginaries. My discussion takes as an example Dutch discourse and research on integration. Crucial to the constitution of societ…
Professionalism as Symbolic Capital
Pierre Bourdieu has given a brief but fierce critique of the concept of 'profession' that calls for a more reflexive analysis of the professions and in fact suggests not using the concept at all. In this contribution, we explicate the gist of that critique and argue it is possible to analyze it in a Bourdieusian fashion. We regard professionalism as a form of symbolic capital, the substance of which is constantly at stake in power-driven contexts…
The Virtualization of Citizenship
This article illustrates the difference between formal citizenship and moral citizenship, and traces the shift in focus from formal to moral citizenship in Dutch national and local policy. The mixing of 'citizenship' with 'integration' has given rise to what can be termed a virtualization of citizenship. When 'integration' becomes 'citizenship', the citizenship status of those persons that are formal citizens but supposedly lack 'integration' bot…
Introduction
When migrant status and citizenship are defined by means of state categories, the language of inclusion and exclusion is key to an understanding of their contemporary shape and historical transformation. This introductory article provides an overview of some of the most relevant concepts in the discourse analysis of in- and exclusion, specifically with a view to the functioning of nation-state categories. It discusses forms of discursive problema…
Sociological Discourse of the Relational
Pierre Bourdieu's approach to sociology has been so widely recognized as being innovative that his innovations can be said to have been academically incorporated to the degree of having-been-innovative. On the other hand, the more recent work of Bruno Latour seems to offer a fresh innovative impetus to sociology. Over against Bourdieu's relational sociology, Latour's relationist sociology overcomes the subject-object dichotomy, and abandons the n…
Surveillance at sea
The relationship between vision and action is a key element of both practices and conceptualizations of border surveillance in Europe. This article engages with what we call the 'operative vision' of surveillance at sea, specifically as performed by the border control apparatus in the Aegean. We analyse the political consequences of this operative vision by elaborating on three examples of fieldwork conducted in the Aegean and on the islands of C…
City of Exception
Agamben's figure of the homo sacer is much discussed and applied in various social sciences. This article discusses the limits of Agamben's perspective and illustrates the value of an amended version by a discussion of urban policy practices in the Netherlands that operate on the basis of a distinct logic of exception and create urban homines sacri. A discussion of the case of the policy practice of the Rotterdam “Intervention Teams” provides an …
Professional Capital Contested
Although Bourdieu paid scant attention to (and in fact discredited) the notion of professionalism, his social theory is well-equipped to understand the evolution of professional work. Professionalism can be conceived as a set of symbolic resources that (re)produce an occupational order, favoring expertise and craftsmanship. In neo-liberal economies this order is contested and professional powers are distrusted; professional work is seen as closed…
Drawing Lines, Enacting Migration
Migration cannot be readily seen. Yet the study of contemporary migration control and border management, particularly with respect to Europe, abounds in the use of ocular terminology, such as surveillance and monitoring. We approach these issues by asking how the visualization of border lines and their crossings is enacted. More specifically, we seek to conceptualize the visual infrastructure through which border lines and movement lines are draw…
Pierre Bourdieu's Political Turn
This contribution has two main goals. First, Pierre Bourdieu's later work is critically reviewed. The question is posed whether or not his recent critical work has to be interpreted as the result of what might be called a 'political turn'. Second, in reviewing the critical content of this recent work, a clarification of the critical potential present in Bourdieu's general methodological and theoretical presuppositions is given. It can thus be see…
In Medias Res
In Medias Res brengt een gezelschap van gerenommeerde auteurs samen om het oeuvre van Peter Sloterdijk toe te lichten, kritisch te bezien en toe te passen. Sloterdijk is in recente jaren uitgegroeid tot een van de meest toonaangevende Duitse denkers. Zijn werk, dat uitermate relevant is voor filosofen, kunst- en cultuurwetenschappers, sociologen, politicologen en theologen, wordt pas sinds kort vertaald naar het Engels. Dit boek is de eerste Enge…
Prepression
This article argues, on the basis of a discussion of current Dutch databases, that we are witnessing what can be called prepression. This combination of prevention and repression entails the archiving of risky individuals and their selection for ‘early intervention’. Such databases can be seen in light of their work of social imagination: they visualize the constitutive outside of ‘society’, and in so doing function as part of a governing imagina…
Illegal Aliens' and the State, or
This article focuses on the opposite poles of what Agamben, following Schmitt, calls the state of exception: the irregular migrant as homo sacer and the sovereign state. It takes the practice of detaining 'illegal immigrants' as a starting point for reflection on two central features of debates about globalization: (1) the declining relevance of space and (2) the declining relevance of nation-states. The author argues that both may be taking plac…
The Will to Violence
Many social scientific accounts of interpersonal violence hold a few basic premises that are in this article contested as being one-sided. The explanation of violence dissolves the intrinsic character of the phenomenon and replaces the singular aspects of violence by a social-scientific explanatory ground. This explanatory social science is in this article called determinism. Supplementing determinism is a formalism of violence, which focuses on …
Making climates comparable
This article foregrounds comparison as a key practice in science by discussing the case of chronological comparability in paleoclimatology. Based on an ethnographic study of a paleoclimate research project, I illustrate how paleoclimatologists are able to produce comparative data on and images of past climates through the use of 'proxies'. I focus on the calibration of a type of algae as a proxy for climate variables. Such comparability is one il…
A genealogy of neoliberal communitarianism
This article investigates the power/knowledge relations between contemporary penal government and criminological theory. Based on an analysis of the strategic case of the Netherlands, the emergence of what can be called neoliberal communitarianism is discussed. In relation to the ‘penal welfarism’ it succeeds, neoliberal communitarianism provides a rationale of governing that allows a greater amount of complexity precisely because it consists of …
Women from the catacombs of the city’
The current discourse on minorities in the Netherlands has two striking features: (1) it has been narrowed down to Muslim immigrants with Moroccan or Turkish backgrounds; (2) it focuses largely on gender-related issues. In this article, we suggest that there has been a historical switch in the focus of discourse on immigrants from structural factors such as employment and crime rates to cultural factors related mainly to the Islamic background of…
Crime, Citizenship and Community
This article discusses the emergence, in the field of crime and safety, of a formula of government that can be called neoliberal communitarianism. This is a paradoxical governmental strategy that combines a focus on 'individual responsibility', 'community' and a 'selectively tough state'. The discussion is based on the Foucaultian triangle of strategy, political programmes and techniques. The substance of this application consists of a discussion…
The sociologist and the state. An assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology
This paper provides an assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology based on a reading of his posthumously published lectures on the state in Sur l'État. It argues that the state was a foundational element in Bourdieu's rendition of the symbolic order of everyday life. As such, the state becomes equally pivotal in Bourdieu's sociology, the applicability of which rests on the existence of the state, which stabilizes the social fields and their symbol…
Imagining society
This paper looks at how expert and scientific graphic images of immigrant integration in the Netherlands and Germany portray a distance between minority groups and a dominant imagination of society. It specifically explicates the ways "images of alterity" in assessments of immigrant integration are visually structured by means of a pictorial display of spatial markers of distance. It does so by means of a close examination of the visual expressio…
Regimes of Violence and the Trias Violentiae
In common-sense usage, violence is usually conceptualized as intentional physical harm. This makes violence identifiable, locatable, and it facilitates the governing of those identified as committing infractions upon the non-violent community. In this article it is illustrated how this conception of violence legitimates the state by blocking the state's own foundational violence from critical scrutiny. It argues that the liberal state rests on th…
Migration studies
This is a rejoinder to the responses made to my paper ‘Against “immigrant integration”: For an end to neocolonial knowledge production’, which was based on my book Imagined Societies. A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Here, I aim to push the boundaries of our discussion a bit further by arguing that the point is not to come up with better concepts of ‘immigrant integration’. Rather, it is to…
The modernist myth in criminology
In this contribution, Hirschi’s widely influential social bond theory is criticized on logical and theoretical grounds. Central to this critique is the fact that the social bond theory defines crime and the criminal as not being part of (‘conventional’) ‘society’. In that respect, the social bond theory is seen as merely one exponent of what may be called ‘modernist’ criminology. Characteristic of modernist social theory is an abstraction from th…
Discipline or Punishment? The Case of the Dutch Prison
The goals of resocialization and reintegration that keep appearing in policy statements on the prison system in The Netherlands are critically reviewed in this contribution by means of a comparison with daily prison practice. A picture of the modern Dutch prison is sketched with the use of interviews and excerpts from letters. It would appear that in practice a lack of effort exists towards reintegration and resocialization. This difference betwe…
Pierre Bourdieu's Political Turn
This contribution has two main goals. First, Pierre Bourdieu's later work is critically reviewed. The question is posed whether or not his recent critical work has to be interpreted as the result of what might be called a 'political turn'. Second, in reviewing the critical content of this recent work, a clarification of the critical potential present in Bourdieu's general methodological and theoretical presuppositions is given. It can thus be see…
The Will to Violence
Many social scientific accounts of interpersonal violence hold a few basic premises that are in this article contested as being one-sided. The explanation of violence dissolves the intrinsic character of the phenomenon and replaces the singular aspects of violence by a social-scientific explanatory ground. This explanatory social science is in this article called determinism. Supplementing determinism is a formalism of violence, which focuses on …
The Saussurean Influence in Pierre Bourdieu's Relational Sociology
In this contribution the relationship between Pierre Bourdieu's theory of class and semiotics is clarified. It is therefore focused on the relational logic that underpins his analysis in Distinction. It is argued that Bourdieu's relational logic stems for a large part from Saussure. The differences Bourdieu identifies as signifying classes do so only as arbitrary signs and not because of any intrinsic qualities. Furthermore, it is argued that thi…
The Global Sphere
Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (2005) delivers what its subtitle promises: a philosophical theory of globalization. This book and the theory it expounds extends the morphological philosophy of space put forward previously by Sloterdijk in the Sphären-trilogy (p. 14),1 which discusses a philosophical history of what he calls terrestrial globalization. For Sloterdijk, the globe as a philosophical concept (Globus, Kugel, sphaira) is a result of terre…
Sociological Discourse of the Relational
Pierre Bourdieu's approach to sociology has been so widely recognized as being innovative that his innovations can be said to have been academically incorporated to the degree of having-been-innovative. On the other hand, the more recent work of Bruno Latour seems to offer a fresh innovative impetus to sociology. Over against Bourdieu's relational sociology, Latour's relationist sociology overcomes the subject-object dichotomy, and abandons the n…
Contexts of Anxiety
This article analyses the attention given in the Netherlands to what is called 'senseless violence' as an expression of the general idea that violence is growing, and as an example of a moral panic. It is argued that this is a combination of a grassroots and interest-group moral panic that has been carried along mainly by media and institutionalized civil initiatives. The production of this moral panic is illustrated, together with its consequenc…
Women from the catacombs of the city’
The current discourse on minorities in the Netherlands has two striking features: (1) it has been narrowed down to Muslim immigrants with Moroccan or Turkish backgrounds; (2) it focuses largely on gender-related issues. In this article, we suggest that there has been a historical switch in the focus of discourse on immigrants from structural factors such as employment and crime rates to cultural factors related mainly to the Islamic background of…
On the concept of terrorism
Illegal Aliens' and the State, or
This article focuses on the opposite poles of what Agamben, following Schmitt, calls the state of exception: the irregular migrant as homo sacer and the sovereign state. It takes the practice of detaining 'illegal immigrants' as a starting point for reflection on two central features of debates about globalization: (1) the declining relevance of space and (2) the declining relevance of nation-states. The author argues that both may be taking plac…
Aspects of Violence
This book provides a novel approach to the social scientific study of violence. It argues for an 'extended' definition of violence in order to avoid subscribing to commonsensical or state propagated d
The double helix of cultural assimilationism and neo-liberalism
In this article the recent transformations of citizenship in the Netherlands are analysed in relation to a developing form of governmentality. We regard citizenship as a state regulated technique of in- and exclusion and a crucial instrument in the management of populations. Taking the Dutch contexts of immigration and integration as our case, we argue that cultural assimilationism and neo-liberalism appear in a double helix: they combine to form…
The Autopoiesis of the Artworld after the End of Art
This article critically adapts and applies the views of Niklas Luhmann on the social system of art. Luhmann's systems theory does not have an adequate account of 'the artworld'. Yet by conceiving of the artworld as an autopoietic social system, Luhmann's highly original work can be brought to bear in the sociology of art. This article applies that work by reviewing some historical changes in the autoreference of the artworld as a social system an…
From Zoēpolitics to Biopolitics
Giorgio Agamben's work on biopower thematizes the biopolitical distinction between what the 1789 Declaration distinguishes as citoyen and homme. In this contribution, Foucault's and Agamben's views on biopolitics are critically discussed. It argues that a crucial distinction exists between what can be called zoēpolitics and biopolitics. Whereas the former takes the biological body as its object and is only indirectly geared towards the social bod…
The Virtualization of Citizenship
This article illustrates the difference between formal citizenship and moral citizenship, and traces the shift in focus from formal to moral citizenship in Dutch national and local policy. The mixing of 'citizenship' with 'integration' has given rise to what can be termed a virtualization of citizenship. When 'integration' becomes 'citizenship', the citizenship status of those persons that are formal citizens but supposedly lack 'integration' bot…
Prepression
This article argues, on the basis of a discussion of current Dutch databases, that we are witnessing what can be called prepression. This combination of prevention and repression entails the archiving of risky individuals and their selection for ‘early intervention’. Such databases can be seen in light of their work of social imagination: they visualize the constitutive outside of ‘society’, and in so doing function as part of a governing imagina…
City of Exception
Agamben's figure of the homo sacer is much discussed and applied in various social sciences. This article discusses the limits of Agamben's perspective and illustrates the value of an amended version by a discussion of urban policy practices in the Netherlands that operate on the basis of a distinct logic of exception and create urban homines sacri. A discussion of the case of the policy practice of the Rotterdam “Intervention Teams” provides an …
In Medias Res
In Medias Res brengt een gezelschap van gerenommeerde auteurs samen om het oeuvre van Peter Sloterdijk toe te lichten, kritisch te bezien en toe te passen. Sloterdijk is in recente jaren uitgegroeid tot een van de meest toonaangevende Duitse denkers. Zijn werk, dat uitermate relevant is voor filosofen, kunst- en cultuurwetenschappers, sociologen, politicologen en theologen, wordt pas sinds kort vertaald naar het Engels. Dit boek is de eerste Enge…
The nationalization of desire
Dutch discourse on "integration" is currently characterized by a strong focus on the "culture" of especially Turks and Moroccans, two minority populations in Dutch society mostly of Muslim orientation. This article discusses the issue of the "import bride" as a case study of contemporary culturist discourse. It argues that this issue is problematized because transnational marriage is construed as circumventing loyalty to Dutch society and nation-…
Neoliberal communitarian citizenship
As Western European nation-states adapt to the challenges posed to the nation-state by globalization and immigration, adjusting citizenship criteria for immigrants has been one of the responses to these developments. This article compares the current changes in citizenship policies of three Western European states: the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands. The main concern of the article is to shed light on the emerging development of a for…
Professional Capital Contested
Although Bourdieu paid scant attention to (and in fact discredited) the notion of professionalism, his social theory is well-equipped to understand the evolution of professional work. Professionalism can be conceived as a set of symbolic resources that (re)produce an occupational order, favoring expertise and craftsmanship. In neo-liberal economies this order is contested and professional powers are distrusted; professional work is seen as closed…
Professionalism as Symbolic Capital
Pierre Bourdieu has given a brief but fierce critique of the concept of 'profession' that calls for a more reflexive analysis of the professions and in fact suggests not using the concept at all. In this contribution, we explicate the gist of that critique and argue it is possible to analyze it in a Bourdieusian fashion. We regard professionalism as a form of symbolic capital, the substance of which is constantly at stake in power-driven contexts…
In Medias Res
A genealogy of neoliberal communitarianism
This article investigates the power/knowledge relations between contemporary penal government and criminological theory. Based on an analysis of the strategic case of the Netherlands, the emergence of what can be called neoliberal communitarianism is discussed. In relation to the ‘penal welfarism’ it succeeds, neoliberal communitarianism provides a rationale of governing that allows a greater amount of complexity precisely because it consists of …
Sociology (44 works) · Political science (35 works) · Law (33 works) · Epistemology (24 works) · Politics (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (18 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Gender Studies (11 works)