Zoekresultaten

The Science-Policy Nexus: Colonial Modernity Logics of Cultural Distance and Knowledge Production in European Integration Regimes

Scientific research from within and beyond academia continues to provide the justification and the knowledge for policy developments directed toward migration and integration governance. A proliferation of scholarship aims to study, pilot, and investigate the ‘best practices’ for facilitating integration, which is then taken up in advice to policy makers. Many authors have written about this science-policy nexus (Boswell 2009; Penninx, Garcés-Mascareñas, and Scholten 2005; Scholten et al. 2015; Verbeek, Entzinger, and Scholten 2015) These works have also engaged in critical reflection, problematizing this nexus and demonstrating how funding structures draw researchers not only into addressing short-term policy goals, but also into reproducing some of the essentialist worldviews that come with methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) and the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995). Yet, the colonial legacies and dis/continuities of these logics in integrationism have not received much attention so far.The paper takes a critical lens on the implications of the science-policy complicity in reproducing colonial logics of ‘cultural distance’, based on perspectives and empirical research from different national (Netherlands and Switzerland) and supra-national (EU) contexts. We analyse texts which shape the civic integration programme in the Netherlands, the genealogy of the integration requirement to respect the values of the constitution in Switzerland, and the EU framework on migrant integration. This combined analysis brings forth the role scientists and knowledge producers play in (re)producing the colonial logics within integrationism, and their contributions to the regime of truth within which integration discourse operates. Throughout this article, we draw on examples from these different contexts to display that integration and its migranticized (Dahinden 2016) subjects are constructed through practices deemed as scientific or objective expertise, building on important work by Schinkel (2018) on integration research as “neocolonial knowledge production” and Favell’s (2022) critical reflections on integration indicator frameworks. As we demonstrate, the “idea of integration as an issue of cultural distance is rendered imaginable in and through colonial legacies and scientific practices from which policy draws legitimacy. We show how cultural distance is produced in the scientification of migrants’ assimilability in a ‘Western work ethic’, in measurement of migrants’ adherence to liberal values, and through constructions of integration drawing on social imaginaries of national and European identity. Importantly, we argue that by presenting this cultural distance as a product of objective, scientific processes of empirical observation, the notion of cultural distance is normalised and depoliticized, which ultimately legitimizes integrationism as a mode of governance.The present study builds on important contributions (by Schinkel 2017; Favell 2022; Korteweg 2017; Bonjour and Duyvendak 2017, and others) in attempting to destabilize the normalization of integrationism as the widely accepted mode of governance of ‘immigrant’ or ‘ethnic’ populations and their inherent and problematic ‘distance’. The content and structure of this summer school in post-colonial Amsterdam would allow us to continue our critical reflexive discussions to better understand the colonial logics at play and how they operate in multiple contexts and at multiple levels of governance, in and beyond integration

Meeting “Belinda”

Paper presented at the 31st European Seminar in Ethnomusicology ESEM, Limerick (Ireland), 18/9/2015. This paper presents a case study of ‘Belinda’, a Dutch woman in her early sixties who considers herself at the same time as ‘un-musical’ and musically hyper-sensitive. She is neither an ‘outstanding performer’ nor a ‘maverick’, but rather an idiosyncratic example of late-modern (i.c. Dutch) everyday life musicality.Interesting as her particular case may be, the focus in this paper is theoretical and methodological. Through concisely discussing Belinda’s biography, I will be able to focus, theoretically, on using practice theory as formulated recently by German cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz as a possible foundation for studying music in late-modern western societies. Reckwitz considers culture as an inherently hybrid and dynamic arena of shared and contested individual understandings of the world, and sees practices – ‘ways of doing and saying’ – as the locus of culture. Methodologically, I posit – referring to Reckwitz but also to the seminal work of George Herbert Mead and others - that there is no need to think about the individual and the social as two mutually exclusive domains, but rather that the individual is inherently social and therefore the study of music in society (‘music as culture’; or maybe ‘ethnomusicology’) should base itself on a thorough micro-ethnographic study of individuals, rather than on more abstract groups, combining ethnographic methods with insights from qualitative sociology and Grounded Theory.The paper hopes to contribute to theoretical and methodological discussions in ethnomusicology. Because the study of ‘Belinda’ is a strong example of a study by a researcher who has been born and bred in the same context of ‘shared and contested ways of doing and saying’ as the researched, the paper also hopes to contribute to ideas about the methodological particularities of ‘ethnomusicology-at-home’ and about the potential value of ethnomusicological studies of late-modern musicality and musical late-modernity.

Bangkok street food : conflicting visions of modernity

Fashion heritage destinations: the twist of tradition in modernity.

Constructing a better contemporary ...

Europeans live their lives at a time when certain collective expectations of how the world should function no longer seem to describe their experience of what actually happens. This bifurcation of experience and expectation is causing some severe symptoms of dislocation. Truth turns relative and his- tory seems in need of radical revision. Even time itself seems topsy-turvy, in a way that some Messianic beliefs find very much to their taste. This is the hallmark of the contemporary moment and why, this essay will argue, that in lieu of any other generalising term, we need to make the most use of ‘contemporary’ and ‘contemporaneity’ for emancipatory purposes.

Decolonising civic integration: a critical analysis of texts used in Dutch civic integration programmes

European civic integration programmes claim to provide newcomers with necessary tools for successful participation. Simultaneously, these programmes have been criticised for being restrictive, market-driven and for working towards an implicit goal of limiting migration. Authors have questioned how these programmes discursively construct an offensive image of the Other and how colonial histories are reproduced in the constructions seen today. The Dutch civic integration programme is considered a leading example of a restrictive programme within Europe. Research has critically questioned the discourses within its policies, yet limited research has moved beyond policy to focus on discourse in texts in practice. This study presents a critical discourse analysis of texts used in the civic integration programme and demonstrates that they participate in multiple discursive constructions: the construction of the Dutch nation-state and its citizens as inherently modern, the construction of the Other as Unmodern and thus a threat, and the construction of the hierarchical relationship between the two. The civic integration programme has been left out of discussions on decolonisation to date, contributing to it remaining a core practice of othering. This study applies post-colonial theories to understand the impacts of current discourse, and forwards possibilities for consideration of decolonised alternatives.