We are organizing a panel at the upcoming European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) conference in Milan, 20-23 July 2016. The panel ‘Raising Europe: Managing parents and the production of good citizens’ examines how European welfare states attempt to produce good citizens. We invite papers that use the realm of parenting to study how European states attempt to raise their citizens (see below for long abstract).

Paper proposals can be submitted through the EASA website, following this link:

http://nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2016/panels.php5?PanelID=4069

The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2016.

Kind regards,

Synnøve Bendixsen (University of Bergen)
Charlotte Faircloth (University of Roehampton )
Anouk de Koning (Radboud University Nijmegen)

Long Abstract

European national publics are diversifying. Governments often see this diversity as creating challenges with respect to the fabric of national society, social cohesion, and the production of good future citizens. Simultaneously, in times of economic crisis and neoliberal reforms many governments redefine their role vis-à-vis citizens and society, stressing citizens’ ‘responsibility’, their ‘own strength’ and mutual aid. This panel examines how, against the background of these governmental concerns, European welfare states attempt to produce good citizens. It does so by using the realm of parenting as its vantage point, since this is the space where new citizens are most literally moulded, both in the intimate sphere of the family and in public institutions.

This panel invites papers that discuss how governmental agencies, such as schools and health care institutions, manage parents through a range of policies, institutional arrangements and professional practices, and how various parents respond to such attempts at governing. In what ways do various institutional actors attempt to govern and foster the production of future citizens? What are the parental responses to governmental interactions and interventions related to their parenting? What might be some of the unintended or corrosive consequences of these interventions at the level of intimate family relations, and society more widely? By comparing cases from across Europe, this panel will provide insights into European welfare states’ attempts to raise their citizens in the context of diversifying national publics and neoliberal reforms.

Photo: Ivar Fjeld

By Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, associate professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen

Time: December 15, 1200-1330

Place: UNI Rokkan centre, 6.th floor

Notions and practices of security colonise both state and urban contexts across Africa. Arguably, these notions and practices are also integral to wider global political formations where urban formations in Africa are often cast as pre-figuring the shape of future global cities more generally. Based on fieldworks in the Mozambican cities of Maputo and Chimoio, this paper sees security there as related to violent crime and capital accumulation in ways that undermine policy-oriented representations of security provision as solely undertaken by state police supplemented by neoliberal assemblages of security companies.

Rather, and more specifically, the paper shows how security is not only subjected to a spatialized logic of race and social control but also renders violence – in all its forms – central to its exercise and cosmologies. This point will be emphasised by analysing how various forms of policing must be understood beyond the security-development nexus. These forms of policing increasingly involve a gradual emergence of what I call ‘predatory security’ that is central to violent modes of capital accumulation that shape African urban landscapes as well as define the contours of the state. The paper suggests that as a configuration of accumulative violence such predatory security has consequences for how we should approach calls for rights to the city as well as the state in urban African orders and beyond.

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, associate professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, has researched issues such as state formation, violence, poverty and rural-urban connections in Mozambique since 1998. Bertelsen has published extensively internationally and is publishing the monograph Violent Becomings: State Formation, Culture and Power in Mozambique (Berghahn Books, 2016) and has co-edited the anthologies Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval (with Bruce Kapferer, Berghahn Books, [2009] 2012) and Navigating Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania, ca. 1850 to 1950 (with Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland, Berghahn Books, 2015).

Marry-Anne Karlsen, Department of Social Anthropology and part of IMER network, will give a trial lecture for the PhD degree on the assigned topic:

Could the concept of “precarious inclusion” also be used (in Norway and beyond) to rethink other forms of inclusive exclusion, such as the labor of irregularized migrants who, in contrast, may be considered to be rather productive “others”?

The title of her thesis is:

“Precarious Inclusion. Irregular migration, practice of care, and state b/ordering in Norway”

• Time: Thursday, December 10^th, 2015 15:15 p.m.
• Place: Auditorium at Ulrike Pihls hus, Prof. Keysers gt. 1

PUBLIC DEFENCE

• Time: Friday, December 11^th, 2015, 10.15 a.m.
• Place: Auditorium at Ulrike Pihls hus, Prof. Keysers gt. 1

Opponents for the public defence:

• First opponent: Professor Nicholas de Genova, Kings College London
• Second opponent: Associate Professo Heide Castañeda, University of South Florida
• The third member of the committee is: Professor Andrew Lattas, UiB
• The public defence will be chaired by Professor Leif Ove Larsen

The event is open to the public

WHEN: October 13, 2015 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
WHERE: UNI Rokkansenteret, (6etg), Nygårdsgaten 5, 5015 Bergen, Norway

In this talk, Anouk de Koning will discuss how racialized discourses on multicultural failure and the trouble with the children of migrants is taken up and contested in multicultural Amsterdam. Like in other Western European countries, multiculturalism backlash discourses have dominated public debates in the Netherlands since the 1990s. 

She asks how people who are framed as part of the problem engage the moral imperatives of such backlash discourses and the anxieties they broadcast. Amsterdam’s Diamantbuurt provides a good vantage point for such an exploration since the neighbourhoods’ unruly Moroccan-Dutch young men have played an important role in Dutch backlash discourses. How do Moroccan-Dutch Diamantbuurt residents, who are closely identified with these iconic bad guys, negotiate the dominant narrative regarding their neighbourhood?

In her article, she demonstrates that for these residents, the anxieties articulated in backlash discourses become the grounds for an anxious grappling with abjectness and identification.

Anouk de Koning is assistant professor in Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She is the author of Global Dreams: Class, Gender and Public Space in Cosmopolitan Cairo (AUC Press, 2009) and, with Rivke Jaffe, Introducing Urban Anthropology (Routledge, 2016).

A light lunch will be served