Marguerite Van Den Berg
Biographic Data
| ID | 3674286 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marguerite Van Den Berg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marguerite Van Den |
| FAMILY NAME | Berg |
| SIGNATURE | VAN DEN BERG M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9549-1687 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 164 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Wat het toeslagenschandaal en de focus op ‘fraude’ in sociaal beleid ons kan leren over de erfenis van het Nederlandse koloniale verleden
Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community
Welfare ruination, debris and Europeans’ make-shift practices: A research agenda
The mainstream literature on welfare retrenchment, austerity and post-welfare states proposes that since the mid 1970s, welfare states are in a state of ‘permanent austerity’. To offer an alternative to such stories of loss and their problematic nostalgic retelling of recent European history, leaving out its imperial histories, this article proposes to look instead at welfare as the object of ruination. This approach builds on literatures that fo…
Improvising Covid Relief in New Delhi: Rehearsal and Improvisational Capacity in Informal Student Networks
Building on qualitative interviews, this article brings into view how New Delhi university students organized improvised forms of Covid relief during the Delta coronavirus wave in the spring of 2021. Responding to a lack of care due to state negligence and a breakdown of public and private healthcare infrastructure, students coordinated access to crucial resources such as masks, other personal protective equipment and even oxygen through the use …
What the Dutch benefits scandal and policy's focus on ‘fraud’ can teach us about the endurance of empire
In the benefits scandal, the Dutch state wrongfully accused at least 35,000 Dutch parents of young children of committing fraud with subsidies for childcare, based on ethnic profiling. Especially families with heritage in the former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and Suriname were hit. Because they had to compensate for this supposed ‘fraud’, families were often thrown into severe debt and years of financial and legal struggle, a struggle that i…
The new discomforts of precarious workers: Wardrobe matter, insecurity and the temporality of calibration in dress work
This article provides a study of precarisation through the lens of dress work: the mundane practice of dressing the body for work. Based on intimate in-depth wardrobe interviews and analyses of workers' narratives about their dressing practices, we develop a perspective on what insecure work feels like for workers in the interactive services and creative industries. We understand dress work as a materially mediated practice in which workers often…
Who can wear flip-flops to work? Ethnographic vignettes on aesthetic labour in precarity
A central aspect of post-Fordist labour, many claim, is that the personal and the professional are increasingly intertwined. Especially in precarious urban sectors such as the interactive services, the aesthetic presentation of self is part of the product or service offered. Indeed, the separation between consumption and production, between private and work is no longer so strict for many, especially, in terms of aesthetics. Steering clear from s…
Precarious masculinities and gender as pedagogy: Aesthetic advice-encounters for the Dutch urban economy
In the context of precarious post-Fordist urban labour markets, Dress for Success in the Netherlands, a non-profit working in the context of the welfare state, provides dress advice to a majority of men. Dress advice consists of moments in which demands for immaterial labour find material translations into items of clothing. Building on ethnographic observations, I argue that dress advice-encounters should be seen as exercises in adaptability to …
Pedagogies of optimism: Teaching to ‘look forward’ in activating welfare programmes in the Netherlands
In the context of the Dutch welfare state, precarisation entails particular pedagogies: citizens are taught how to feel about being insecure through the techniques of (1) accepting; (2) controlling; and (3) imagining. Welfare activation thus focuses on teaching citizens to accept their precarious position, to embrace it and to prepare for its continuation while remaining optimistic about its discontinuation. Perhaps cruelly, then, the state teach…
The Aesthetics of Work-Readiness: Aesthetic Judgements and Pedagogies for Conditional Welfare and Post-Fordist Labour Markets
Recent legislation in the Netherlands takes conditional welfare to a new level. Local welfare offices can now give benefit sanctions to welfare clients that 'obstruct employment' by their appearance. Through a qualitative and ethnographic study of aesthetic evaluation practices in Dutch welfare offices it is argued that: (1) an everyday aesthetic labour is pivotal in post-Fordist labour markets; (2) in times of precarization, this is so for unemp…
Of “city lounges”, “bans on gathering” and macho policies - Gender, class and race in productions of space for Rotterdam's post-industrial future
The discursive uses of Jane Jacobs for the genderfying city: Understanding the productions of space for post-Fordist gender notions
The massive increases in women’s labour participation and the return of families with children to the city are often overlooked in understanding contemporary views on urban planning, despite decades of feminist urban theory. This article proposes to understand what is termed the ‘urban gender revolution’ through looking closely at the celebration of Jane Jacobs as the planning hero of the day. Zooming in on the city of Amsterdam, this article off…
Activating’ those that ‘lag behind’: Space-time politics in Dutch parenting training for migrants
Space and time (or rather space-time) are crucial concepts in the legitimation of policy interventions into citizens' private lives. Across Europe, social policy measures to promote 'activation' among migrant communities-employment guidance, parenting training, youth work and so on-have proliferated, aiming to 'move' the Other into the here-and-now of European modernity. Van den Berg brings together theories of space-time, alterity and 'cultural …
Egalitarian paternalism: Interactional forms of negotiating equality and intervention in Dutch policy practices
Governments develop new strategies to ‘guide’ citizens’ behaviour. Simultaneously, hierarchical policy intervention is increasingly frowned upon. The apparent tension in contemporary social policy between the will to intervene, on the one hand, and the will to be equal on the other hand is the central problematic of this article. The Netherlands are a strategic context in which to investigate how egalitarianism and intervention are negotiated in …
Performing dialogical Dutchness: Negotiating a National Imaginary in Parenting Guidance
In contemporary Europe, national identities are fiercely contested and governments have sought ways to strengthen national identification. Notwithstanding this European pattern, government policies are implemented differently and belonging to the nation comes to involve different images and enactments across contexts. In the Netherlands, especially, belonging to the nation is at stake in many high‐profile public and political struggles. In this c…
Parler de sexe sans rougir: Comment les cours à l'usage des parents construisent l'« identité néerlandaise » et la « sexualité normale »
De nombreuses discussions sur les valeurs et les idéaux néerlandais portent aujourd'hui sur le sexe et la sexualité. Dans l'« approche globale » de la santé sexuelle aujourd'hui développée aux Pays-Bas, les parents et le travail parental jouent un rôle important. Cet article propose une analyse du matériau ethnographique et du contenu des supports pédagogiques développés pour le cours « Grandir dans l'amour » conçu pour former les parents à l'édu…
Madonna as a symbol of reflexive modernisation
The communication of social and cultural tensions embodied in the symbol Madonna explain the unparalleled public and scientific fascination for this cultural phenomenon. These tensions can be seen as communications of reflexive modernisation, in which modernisation has produced its own counterforce. We propose to understand ‘celebrity’ as a position from which a symbol can communicate such social tensions. That is to say that celebrity is a space…
City Children and Genderfied Neighbourhoods: The New Generation as Urban Regeneration Strategy
Former industrial cities in the West are employing gentrification as urban policy. In these policies, women and families currently play an important role as gentrification pioneers. In my analysis of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, I propose the term genderfication to understand the gender dimensions of this process. Genderfication refers to the production of space for different gender relations. I analyse Rotterdam's urban planning program for bec…
Paternalizing mothers: Feminist repertoires in contemporary Dutch civilizing offensives
The stress in Dutch policy texts and policy practices on the emancipation of migrant women from their family and spouses goes hand in hand with a focus on precisely women’s role within the family: that of the mother. In this paper, we ask the question how this is possible. We aim to shed light on this question by understanding contemporary policy texts and policy practices in the context of 1) a strong domestic motherhood ideology and 2) a Dutch …
Femininity As a City Marketing Strategy: Gender Bending Rotterdam
Rotterdam organised the festival ‘La City’ as an entrepreneurial strategy to upgrade the city’s class position, using femininity as a tool. ‘La City’ was an attempt to introduce a new economy in Rotterdam: one that is service-based and post-industrial. Rotterdam is a former industrial city and is now trying to establish a new economy and a new spatial organisation. In this article, ‘La City’ campaign material, texts on the character of the city a…
Parent involvement as professionalization: Professionals' struggle for power in Dutch urban deprived areas
Parent involvement policies have been central in the Dutch push towards educational governance. How the implementation of these policies plays out on the ground is context‐dependent. The ethnic and class cleavages impacting the Dutch educational system should be taken into account. On the basis of 50 in‐depth interviews with teachers, social workers and school managers in secondary education, we analyse what ‘parent involvement’ becomes in Dutch …
City of Exception: The Dutch Revanchist City and the Urban Homo Sacer
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 …
Subjective social mobility: Definitions and expectations of 'moving up' of poor Moroccan women in the Netherlands
Social mobility is most commonly measured in terms of occupational prestige or educational attainment. Alternative approaches to social mobility can mostly be found in qualitative research. However, these approaches also often conceptualize social mobility as attainment of occupational status or educational degrees. Interpreting the narratives of Moroccan migrant women in the Netherlands, alternative definitions of social mobility are discerned t…
Women from the catacombs of the city’: Gender notions in Dutch culturist discourse
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…
Reshaping the American mainstream: Immigrants’ influence on American culture and inequalities
Michael Jones-Correa ( ed .) 2001 : Governing American Cities. Inter-Ethnic Coalitions, Competition, and Conflict . New York : Russell Sage Foundation . Philip Kasinitz, John Mollenkopf and Mary Waters ( eds .) 2004 : Becoming New Yorkers. Ethnographies of the New Second Generation . New York : Russell Sage Foundation . Nancy Foner 2005 : In a New Land. A Comparative View of Immigration . New York/London : New York University Press . The growth o…
City of Exception: The Dutch Revanchist City and the Urban Homo Sacer
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 …
City Children and Genderfied Neighbourhoods: The New Generation as Urban Regeneration Strategy
Former industrial cities in the West are employing gentrification as urban policy. In these policies, women and families currently play an important role as gentrification pioneers. In my analysis of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, I propose the term genderfication to understand the gender dimensions of this process. Genderfication refers to the production of space for different gender relations. I analyse Rotterdam's urban planning program for bec…
Activating’ those that ‘lag behind’: Space-time politics in Dutch parenting training for migrants
Space and time (or rather space-time) are crucial concepts in the legitimation of policy interventions into citizens' private lives. Across Europe, social policy measures to promote 'activation' among migrant communities-employment guidance, parenting training, youth work and so on-have proliferated, aiming to 'move' the Other into the here-and-now of European modernity. Van den Berg brings together theories of space-time, alterity and 'cultural …
Paternalizing mothers: Feminist repertoires in contemporary Dutch civilizing offensives
The stress in Dutch policy texts and policy practices on the emancipation of migrant women from their family and spouses goes hand in hand with a focus on precisely women’s role within the family: that of the mother. In this paper, we ask the question how this is possible. We aim to shed light on this question by understanding contemporary policy texts and policy practices in the context of 1) a strong domestic motherhood ideology and 2) a Dutch …
Femininity As a City Marketing Strategy: Gender Bending Rotterdam
Rotterdam organised the festival ‘La City’ as an entrepreneurial strategy to upgrade the city’s class position, using femininity as a tool. ‘La City’ was an attempt to introduce a new economy in Rotterdam: one that is service-based and post-industrial. Rotterdam is a former industrial city and is now trying to establish a new economy and a new spatial organisation. In this article, ‘La City’ campaign material, texts on the character of the city a…
Women from the catacombs of the city’: Gender notions in Dutch culturist discourse
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…
The Aesthetics of Work-Readiness: Aesthetic Judgements and Pedagogies for Conditional Welfare and Post-Fordist Labour Markets
Recent legislation in the Netherlands takes conditional welfare to a new level. Local welfare offices can now give benefit sanctions to welfare clients that 'obstruct employment' by their appearance. Through a qualitative and ethnographic study of aesthetic evaluation practices in Dutch welfare offices it is argued that: (1) an everyday aesthetic labour is pivotal in post-Fordist labour markets; (2) in times of precarization, this is so for unemp…
Pedagogies of optimism: Teaching to ‘look forward’ in activating welfare programmes in the Netherlands
In the context of the Dutch welfare state, precarisation entails particular pedagogies: citizens are taught how to feel about being insecure through the techniques of (1) accepting; (2) controlling; and (3) imagining. Welfare activation thus focuses on teaching citizens to accept their precarious position, to embrace it and to prepare for its continuation while remaining optimistic about its discontinuation. Perhaps cruelly, then, the state teach…
The discursive uses of Jane Jacobs for the genderfying city: Understanding the productions of space for post-Fordist gender notions
The massive increases in women’s labour participation and the return of families with children to the city are often overlooked in understanding contemporary views on urban planning, despite decades of feminist urban theory. This article proposes to understand what is termed the ‘urban gender revolution’ through looking closely at the celebration of Jane Jacobs as the planning hero of the day. Zooming in on the city of Amsterdam, this article off…
Performing dialogical Dutchness: Negotiating a National Imaginary in Parenting Guidance
In contemporary Europe, national identities are fiercely contested and governments have sought ways to strengthen national identification. Notwithstanding this European pattern, government policies are implemented differently and belonging to the nation comes to involve different images and enactments across contexts. In the Netherlands, especially, belonging to the nation is at stake in many high‐profile public and political struggles. In this c…
Who can wear flip-flops to work? Ethnographic vignettes on aesthetic labour in precarity
A central aspect of post-Fordist labour, many claim, is that the personal and the professional are increasingly intertwined. Especially in precarious urban sectors such as the interactive services, the aesthetic presentation of self is part of the product or service offered. Indeed, the separation between consumption and production, between private and work is no longer so strict for many, especially, in terms of aesthetics. Steering clear from s…
Subjective social mobility: Definitions and expectations of 'moving up' of poor Moroccan women in the Netherlands
Social mobility is most commonly measured in terms of occupational prestige or educational attainment. Alternative approaches to social mobility can mostly be found in qualitative research. However, these approaches also often conceptualize social mobility as attainment of occupational status or educational degrees. Interpreting the narratives of Moroccan migrant women in the Netherlands, alternative definitions of social mobility are discerned t…
Of “city lounges”, “bans on gathering” and macho policies - Gender, class and race in productions of space for Rotterdam's post-industrial future
What the Dutch benefits scandal and policy's focus on ‘fraud’ can teach us about the endurance of empire
In the benefits scandal, the Dutch state wrongfully accused at least 35,000 Dutch parents of young children of committing fraud with subsidies for childcare, based on ethnic profiling. Especially families with heritage in the former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and Suriname were hit. Because they had to compensate for this supposed ‘fraud’, families were often thrown into severe debt and years of financial and legal struggle, a struggle that i…
The new discomforts of precarious workers: Wardrobe matter, insecurity and the temporality of calibration in dress work
This article provides a study of precarisation through the lens of dress work: the mundane practice of dressing the body for work. Based on intimate in-depth wardrobe interviews and analyses of workers' narratives about their dressing practices, we develop a perspective on what insecure work feels like for workers in the interactive services and creative industries. We understand dress work as a materially mediated practice in which workers often…
Precarious masculinities and gender as pedagogy: Aesthetic advice-encounters for the Dutch urban economy
In the context of precarious post-Fordist urban labour markets, Dress for Success in the Netherlands, a non-profit working in the context of the welfare state, provides dress advice to a majority of men. Dress advice consists of moments in which demands for immaterial labour find material translations into items of clothing. Building on ethnographic observations, I argue that dress advice-encounters should be seen as exercises in adaptability to …
Parler de sexe sans rougir: Comment les cours à l'usage des parents construisent l'« identité néerlandaise » et la « sexualité normale »
De nombreuses discussions sur les valeurs et les idéaux néerlandais portent aujourd'hui sur le sexe et la sexualité. Dans l'« approche globale » de la santé sexuelle aujourd'hui développée aux Pays-Bas, les parents et le travail parental jouent un rôle important. Cet article propose une analyse du matériau ethnographique et du contenu des supports pédagogiques développés pour le cours « Grandir dans l'amour » conçu pour former les parents à l'édu…
Welfare ruination, debris and Europeans’ make-shift practices: A research agenda
The mainstream literature on welfare retrenchment, austerity and post-welfare states proposes that since the mid 1970s, welfare states are in a state of ‘permanent austerity’. To offer an alternative to such stories of loss and their problematic nostalgic retelling of recent European history, leaving out its imperial histories, this article proposes to look instead at welfare as the object of ruination. This approach builds on literatures that fo…
Egalitarian paternalism: Interactional forms of negotiating equality and intervention in Dutch policy practices
Governments develop new strategies to ‘guide’ citizens’ behaviour. Simultaneously, hierarchical policy intervention is increasingly frowned upon. The apparent tension in contemporary social policy between the will to intervene, on the one hand, and the will to be equal on the other hand is the central problematic of this article. The Netherlands are a strategic context in which to investigate how egalitarianism and intervention are negotiated in …
Parent involvement as professionalization: Professionals' struggle for power in Dutch urban deprived areas
Parent involvement policies have been central in the Dutch push towards educational governance. How the implementation of these policies plays out on the ground is context‐dependent. The ethnic and class cleavages impacting the Dutch educational system should be taken into account. On the basis of 50 in‐depth interviews with teachers, social workers and school managers in secondary education, we analyse what ‘parent involvement’ becomes in Dutch …
Reshaping the American mainstream: Immigrants’ influence on American culture and inequalities
Michael Jones-Correa ( ed .) 2001 : Governing American Cities. Inter-Ethnic Coalitions, Competition, and Conflict . New York : Russell Sage Foundation . Philip Kasinitz, John Mollenkopf and Mary Waters ( eds .) 2004 : Becoming New Yorkers. Ethnographies of the New Second Generation . New York : Russell Sage Foundation . Nancy Foner 2005 : In a New Land. A Comparative View of Immigration . New York/London : New York University Press . The growth o…
Women from the catacombs of the city’: Gender notions in Dutch culturist discourse
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…
Parent involvement as professionalization: Professionals' struggle for power in Dutch urban deprived areas
Parent involvement policies have been central in the Dutch push towards educational governance. How the implementation of these policies plays out on the ground is context‐dependent. The ethnic and class cleavages impacting the Dutch educational system should be taken into account. On the basis of 50 in‐depth interviews with teachers, social workers and school managers in secondary education, we analyse what ‘parent involvement’ becomes in Dutch …
City of Exception: The Dutch Revanchist City and the Urban Homo Sacer
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 …
Subjective social mobility: Definitions and expectations of 'moving up' of poor Moroccan women in the Netherlands
Social mobility is most commonly measured in terms of occupational prestige or educational attainment. Alternative approaches to social mobility can mostly be found in qualitative research. However, these approaches also often conceptualize social mobility as attainment of occupational status or educational degrees. Interpreting the narratives of Moroccan migrant women in the Netherlands, alternative definitions of social mobility are discerned t…
Paternalizing mothers: Feminist repertoires in contemporary Dutch civilizing offensives
The stress in Dutch policy texts and policy practices on the emancipation of migrant women from their family and spouses goes hand in hand with a focus on precisely women’s role within the family: that of the mother. In this paper, we ask the question how this is possible. We aim to shed light on this question by understanding contemporary policy texts and policy practices in the context of 1) a strong domestic motherhood ideology and 2) a Dutch …
Femininity As a City Marketing Strategy: Gender Bending Rotterdam
Rotterdam organised the festival ‘La City’ as an entrepreneurial strategy to upgrade the city’s class position, using femininity as a tool. ‘La City’ was an attempt to introduce a new economy in Rotterdam: one that is service-based and post-industrial. Rotterdam is a former industrial city and is now trying to establish a new economy and a new spatial organisation. In this article, ‘La City’ campaign material, texts on the character of the city a…
Parler de sexe sans rougir: Comment les cours à l'usage des parents construisent l'« identité néerlandaise » et la « sexualité normale »
De nombreuses discussions sur les valeurs et les idéaux néerlandais portent aujourd'hui sur le sexe et la sexualité. Dans l'« approche globale » de la santé sexuelle aujourd'hui développée aux Pays-Bas, les parents et le travail parental jouent un rôle important. Cet article propose une analyse du matériau ethnographique et du contenu des supports pédagogiques développés pour le cours « Grandir dans l'amour » conçu pour former les parents à l'édu…
Madonna as a symbol of reflexive modernisation
The communication of social and cultural tensions embodied in the symbol Madonna explain the unparalleled public and scientific fascination for this cultural phenomenon. These tensions can be seen as communications of reflexive modernisation, in which modernisation has produced its own counterforce. We propose to understand ‘celebrity’ as a position from which a symbol can communicate such social tensions. That is to say that celebrity is a space…
City Children and Genderfied Neighbourhoods: The New Generation as Urban Regeneration Strategy
Former industrial cities in the West are employing gentrification as urban policy. In these policies, women and families currently play an important role as gentrification pioneers. In my analysis of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, I propose the term genderfication to understand the gender dimensions of this process. Genderfication refers to the production of space for different gender relations. I analyse Rotterdam's urban planning program for bec…
Performing dialogical Dutchness: Negotiating a National Imaginary in Parenting Guidance
In contemporary Europe, national identities are fiercely contested and governments have sought ways to strengthen national identification. Notwithstanding this European pattern, government policies are implemented differently and belonging to the nation comes to involve different images and enactments across contexts. In the Netherlands, especially, belonging to the nation is at stake in many high‐profile public and political struggles. In this c…
Activating’ those that ‘lag behind’: Space-time politics in Dutch parenting training for migrants
Space and time (or rather space-time) are crucial concepts in the legitimation of policy interventions into citizens' private lives. Across Europe, social policy measures to promote 'activation' among migrant communities-employment guidance, parenting training, youth work and so on-have proliferated, aiming to 'move' the Other into the here-and-now of European modernity. Van den Berg brings together theories of space-time, alterity and 'cultural …
Egalitarian paternalism: Interactional forms of negotiating equality and intervention in Dutch policy practices
Governments develop new strategies to ‘guide’ citizens’ behaviour. Simultaneously, hierarchical policy intervention is increasingly frowned upon. The apparent tension in contemporary social policy between the will to intervene, on the one hand, and the will to be equal on the other hand is the central problematic of this article. The Netherlands are a strategic context in which to investigate how egalitarianism and intervention are negotiated in …
Of “city lounges”, “bans on gathering” and macho policies - Gender, class and race in productions of space for Rotterdam's post-industrial future
The discursive uses of Jane Jacobs for the genderfying city: Understanding the productions of space for post-Fordist gender notions
The massive increases in women’s labour participation and the return of families with children to the city are often overlooked in understanding contemporary views on urban planning, despite decades of feminist urban theory. This article proposes to understand what is termed the ‘urban gender revolution’ through looking closely at the celebration of Jane Jacobs as the planning hero of the day. Zooming in on the city of Amsterdam, this article off…
Who can wear flip-flops to work? Ethnographic vignettes on aesthetic labour in precarity
A central aspect of post-Fordist labour, many claim, is that the personal and the professional are increasingly intertwined. Especially in precarious urban sectors such as the interactive services, the aesthetic presentation of self is part of the product or service offered. Indeed, the separation between consumption and production, between private and work is no longer so strict for many, especially, in terms of aesthetics. Steering clear from s…
Precarious masculinities and gender as pedagogy: Aesthetic advice-encounters for the Dutch urban economy
In the context of precarious post-Fordist urban labour markets, Dress for Success in the Netherlands, a non-profit working in the context of the welfare state, provides dress advice to a majority of men. Dress advice consists of moments in which demands for immaterial labour find material translations into items of clothing. Building on ethnographic observations, I argue that dress advice-encounters should be seen as exercises in adaptability to …
Pedagogies of optimism: Teaching to ‘look forward’ in activating welfare programmes in the Netherlands
In the context of the Dutch welfare state, precarisation entails particular pedagogies: citizens are taught how to feel about being insecure through the techniques of (1) accepting; (2) controlling; and (3) imagining. Welfare activation thus focuses on teaching citizens to accept their precarious position, to embrace it and to prepare for its continuation while remaining optimistic about its discontinuation. Perhaps cruelly, then, the state teach…
The Aesthetics of Work-Readiness: Aesthetic Judgements and Pedagogies for Conditional Welfare and Post-Fordist Labour Markets
Recent legislation in the Netherlands takes conditional welfare to a new level. Local welfare offices can now give benefit sanctions to welfare clients that 'obstruct employment' by their appearance. Through a qualitative and ethnographic study of aesthetic evaluation practices in Dutch welfare offices it is argued that: (1) an everyday aesthetic labour is pivotal in post-Fordist labour markets; (2) in times of precarization, this is so for unemp…
The new discomforts of precarious workers: Wardrobe matter, insecurity and the temporality of calibration in dress work
This article provides a study of precarisation through the lens of dress work: the mundane practice of dressing the body for work. Based on intimate in-depth wardrobe interviews and analyses of workers' narratives about their dressing practices, we develop a perspective on what insecure work feels like for workers in the interactive services and creative industries. We understand dress work as a materially mediated practice in which workers often…
Improvising Covid Relief in New Delhi: Rehearsal and Improvisational Capacity in Informal Student Networks
Building on qualitative interviews, this article brings into view how New Delhi university students organized improvised forms of Covid relief during the Delta coronavirus wave in the spring of 2021. Responding to a lack of care due to state negligence and a breakdown of public and private healthcare infrastructure, students coordinated access to crucial resources such as masks, other personal protective equipment and even oxygen through the use …
What the Dutch benefits scandal and policy's focus on ‘fraud’ can teach us about the endurance of empire
In the benefits scandal, the Dutch state wrongfully accused at least 35,000 Dutch parents of young children of committing fraud with subsidies for childcare, based on ethnic profiling. Especially families with heritage in the former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and Suriname were hit. Because they had to compensate for this supposed ‘fraud’, families were often thrown into severe debt and years of financial and legal struggle, a struggle that i…
Wat het toeslagenschandaal en de focus op ‘fraude’ in sociaal beleid ons kan leren over de erfenis van het Nederlandse koloniale verleden
Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community
Welfare ruination, debris and Europeans’ make-shift practices: A research agenda
The mainstream literature on welfare retrenchment, austerity and post-welfare states proposes that since the mid 1970s, welfare states are in a state of ‘permanent austerity’. To offer an alternative to such stories of loss and their problematic nostalgic retelling of recent European history, leaving out its imperial histories, this article proposes to look instead at welfare as the object of ruination. This approach builds on literatures that fo…
Sociology (22 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Economics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Context (archaeology (7 works)