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Feeling Dutch: The Culturalization and Emotionalization of Citizenship and Second-Generation Belonging in the Netherlands

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Chapter in Fear, Anxiety and National Identity. Immigration and Belonging in North America and Western Europe, by Nancy Foner and Patrick Simon (eds.).

The entire book is free to download.

“Fifty years of large-scale immigration has brought significant ethnic, racial, and religious diversity to North America and Western Europe, but has also prompted hostile backlashes. In Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity, a distinguished multidisciplinary group of scholars examine whether and how immigrants and their offspring have been included in the prevailing national identity in the societies where they now live and to what extent they remain perpetual foreigners in the eyes of the long-established native-born. What specific social forces in each country account for the barriers immigrants and their children face, and how do anxieties about immigrant integration and national identity differ on the two sides of the Atlantic?”

Book Review in American Journal of Sociology

coverBook review in American Journal of Sociology on The Headscarf Debates: Conflicts of National Belonging by Anna C. Korteweg, Gökçe Yurdakul

“The book is particularly promising so long as it maintains distance from the “national models” approach—the unfruitful tradition that has domi- nated the field of comparative immigration studies for far too long—by analyzing how certain key concepts have been mobilized in the specific contexts of the four countries. Korteweg and Yurdakul can then provide interesting insights into the specificities of various debates over the head- scarf, ranging from a rejection of the headscarf in France to its reinvention in Turkey. Rather than looking at general immigrant integration policies or questions of secularism in liberal democracies, the authors analyze how the headscarf as a perceived threat has factored into the production of national narratives of belonging.”

American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 121, No. 2 (September 2015), pp. 629-631

 

Enter emotions. Appealing to anxiety and anger in a proces of municipal amalgamation

RCPS_COVER_9-03.inddArticle with Imrat Verhoeven in Critical Policy Studies.

In recent years, emotions have taken center stage in studying politics. However, the field of interpretive policy analysis has largely neglected emotions. In this paper, we argue that we can enter emotions by studying emotional appeals by collective political actors, which are conveyed through emotion words and metaphors. For our empirical analysis, we draw on the political mobilization against the municipal amalgamation of The Hague and its vicinity in The Netherlands between 1997 and 2001. Our analysis indicates that the framing by collective actors contained emotional appeals to anxiety and anger, shifting, over time, from anxiety to anger. This shift resonated with citizens’ opinions and feelings, and provided important emotional energy to citizens’ protest against municipal amalgamation. These emotional appeals provided emotional energy that fueled many protest activities during the summer and fall of 1998. These findings are also relevant for studying other policy controversies and to more mundane processes of policy formation and implementation.

Van Rijn negeert diagnose en aanbeveling van Gezondheidsraad

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Artikel met Evelien Tonkens op Sociale Vraagstukken

Staatssecretaris Van Rijn van het ministerie van VWS vroeg de Gezondheidsraad om advies over de vraag ‘Hoe kunnen onderzoek, praktijk en onderwijs worden samengebracht in een samenhangend, zichzelf instandhoudend systeem van kennisontwikkeling, kenniscirculatie en kennisimplementatie, dat een hoogwaardige beroepsuitoefening in het kader van de Wmo bevordert?’ Belangrijkste aanbeveling van de Gezondheidsraad aan de staatssecretaris was het uitvoeren van een substantieel meerjarig stimuleringsprogramma ’Maatschappelijke ondersteuning’. Dat zou hard nodig zijn in een sector die een cruciale rol speelt in de transformatie, maar die worstelt met een onderontwikkeld kennisdomein. Helaas negeert de staatssecretaris de diagnose van de Gezondheidsraad en slaat hij haar belangrijkste aanbeveling in de wind.

Paperback available of European States and Their Muslim Citizens

This strikingly original volume takes debates about Muslims in Europe into new and exciting territory. It replaces simplistic models of national integration with a more subtle analysis of the intersection between national ideologies and the practical schemas for dealing with Muslims in many different institutions. Each chapter is a model of ethnographic rigour, insight and irony. The result is an ambitious, sophisticated and exceptionally well-crafted volume that deserves to be taken seriously by all researchers and policy makers concerned with Europe’s Muslims.’

James A. Beckford, University of Warwick

 

This book responds to the often loud debates about the place of Muslims in Western Europe by proposing an analysis based in institutions, including schools, courts, hospitals, the military, electoral politics, the labor market, and civic education courses. The contributors consider the way people draw on practical schemas regarding others in their midst who are often categorized as Muslims. Chapters based on fieldwork and policy analysis across several countries examine how people interact in their everyday work lives, where they construct moral boundaries, and how they formulate policies concerning tolerable diversity, immigration, discrimination, and political representation. Rather than assuming that each country has its own national ideology that explains such interactions, contributors trace diverse pathways along which institutions complicate or disrupt allegedly consistent national ideologies. These studies shed light on how Muslims encounter particular faces and facets of the state as they go about their lives, seeking help and legitimacy as new citizens of a fast-changing Europe.

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Available now: Players and Arenas. The Interactive Dynamics of Protest


Look Inside Players and Arenas
Edited by James Jasper and Jan Willem Duyvendak

This book brings together a diverse group of experts to examine the interactions between political protestors and the many strategic players they encounter, such as cultural institutions, religious organizations, and the mass media as well as potential allies, competitors, recruits, and funders. Discussing protestors and players as they interact within the ‘arenas’ of specific social contexts, the essays show that the main constraints on what protestors can accomplish come not from social and political structures, but from other players with different goals and interests. Through a careful treatment of these situations, this volume offers a new way to approach the role of social protest in national and international politics.
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New York and Amsterdam: Immigration and the New Urban Landscape

“The book instructively delves into differing definitions of race, religion and ethnic politics, of integration versus assimilation. In New York, immigrants and their children are approaching a majority of voting-age citizens. In Amsterdam, noncitizens are allowed to vote in local elections after five years of legal residence in the Netherlands.”

New York Times

 

Immigration is dramatically changing major cities throughout the world. Nowhere is this more so than in New York City and Amsterdam, which, after decades of large-scale immigration, now have populations that are more than a third foreign-born. These cities have had to deal with the challenge of incorporating hundreds of thousands of immigrants whose cultures, languages, religions, and racial backgrounds differ dramatically from those of many long-established residents. New York and Amsterdam brings together a distinguished and interdisciplinary group of American and Dutch scholars to examine and compare the impact of immigration on two of the world’s largest urban centers.

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