Political Sociology

Met ingang van 2015 krijgt een grote decentralisatieoperatie haar beslag, waarbij gemeenten eerstverantwoordelijke bestuurslaag worden in het ‘sociale domein’, te weten de (arbeids)participatie, langdurige (extramurale) zorg en jeugdzorg. Dit onderzoek plaatst deze driedubbele decentralisatie in de context van de bredere herziening van de verzorgingsstaat, maar zoemt in op het centrale principe van deze herziening, namelijk de belofte van nabijheid.

Waar tijdens de opbouw van de naoorlogse verzorgingsstaat de nieuwe sociale voorzieningen werden beargumenteerd als bevrijding van afhankelijkheid van familieleden, worden nu juist weer onderlinge steun en hulp uit het eigen sociale netwerk gepropageerd als bevrijding van bureaucratische overheidsbemoeienis. De herziening van de verzorgingsstaat wordt op vier principes gebaseerd:

1. Nabijheid: participatie verschuift van het nationale naar het lokale niveau, teneinde de zorg dichter bij de burger te organiseren en versnippering tegen te gaan
2. Zelfredzaamheid: verschuiving van primaire overheidsverantwoordelijkheid naar primaire verantwoordelijkheid van burgers onderling. Burgers worden gestimuleerd hun eigen problemen op te lossen, zo nodig met beroep op hun sociale netwerk.
3. Wederkerigheid: tegenover het verkrijgen van rechten staat de plicht tot het leveren van een tegenprestatie, o.a. in de vorm van (vrijwilligers)werk
4. Integraliteit: breed opgeleide en breed inzetbare professionals in ‘sociale wijkteams’ moeten door hun integrale aanpak dwarsverbanden leggen tussen de drie gedecentraliseerde beleidsterreinen. Hierdoor zou er efficiënter gewerkt kunnen worden dan in de gangbare ‘verkokerde’ werkwijze, waarbij hulpverleners langs elkaar heen werken 

Deze principiële herziening van de verzorgingsstaat is niet alleen een bestuurlijke maar ook een affectieve aangelegenheid. Zij gaat gepaard met een appèl op en de promotie van affectieve banden tussen burgers onderling en promoot de ontwikkeling en inzet van die affectieve banden.

Onderzoeksmethoden

Het project is tweeledig:

• In het kortlopende onderzoek wordt door middel van een quick scan en literatuuronderzoek geïnventariseerd op welke manier de vier principes terugkomen in gemeentelijke plannen en projecten voor de drie beleidsterreinen en welke problemen gemeenten daarbij voorzien.
• In het langlopend onderzoek worden in een drietal gemeenten (groot, middelgroot en klein) de twee concrete, nieuwe strategieën geanalyseerd die de vier principes van decentralisatie duidelijk belichamen: sociale wijkteams en sociale netwerken. 

Tezamen geven deze onderzoeken naar sociale wijkteams en sociale netwerken antwoord op de volgende vragen:

• Leidt de decentralisatie (ook) in de uitvoering tot variatie tussen gemeenten, en geldt dit voor alle drie de werkvelden (en hun overlap)? Is autonomie van gemeenten dus toegenomen (aandachtspunt 1) maar wellicht ook de rechtsongelijkheid tussen burgers (aandachtspunt 3)? 
• Leiden pogingen tot nieuwe vormen van samenwerking in sociale wijkteams (‘integrale aanpakken’) tot effectievere aanpak van sociale problemen of is veeleer sprake van de decentralisatieparadox, aangezien de werkbedrijven bijvoorbeeld per arbeidsregio worden georganiseerd en het rijk aanstuurt op gemeentelijke schaalgrootte van 100.000+ inwoners (aandachtspunt 2)? In hoeverre is onder deze laatste omstandigheden nabijheid te realiseren?
• Hoe kunnen vormen van decentralisatie worden gestimuleerd die recht doen aan bestaande variatie in lokale situaties, zonder dat de voordelen van centrale aansturing (niet allemaal opnieuw het wiel uitvinden) en het principe van rechtsgelijkheid (gelijke behandeling van gelijke gevallen) teloorgaan (aandachtspunten 2 en 4)?
• Wat zijn de effecten en effectiviteit van de nieuwe aanpakken op het gebied van arbeidstoeleiding, langdurige zorg en jeugdzorg (aandachtspunt 5)? 

Funding: Stichting Instituut GAK

Period: 01-04-2014 until 31-03-2018

Since the 90s, notions of society have become intertwined with expectations of the possibilities of the internet. All over the world, companies, government institutions, and citizens work on realizing so-called Smart Cities.

Although this concept is ambiguous, the core vision is that of a future city in which flows of people, products, traffic, communication and services are finely tuned to each other and receptive of local, context-specific needs. Uniquitous data-processing technologies are allotted a key role in orchestrating this.

Value orientation

Since the revelations on large-scale spying practices by secret services, facilitated by Internet corporations, and in response to hierarchical architectures and assymetric power relations embedded in Smart City designs, the EU framework  Horizon 2020 has set the task to build future Smart Cities in ways that are true to democratic values in general and to citizen participation in particular.

A Smart City platform

Unfortunately, the cluster of guiding visions attached to the idea of the Smart City - promising greater efficiency, more citizen participation, better health, etc. - offers no clues as to how to organize Smart City innovation according to this principle of stakeholder equality. In the past decades, different networks and individuals have worked on partial solutions, yet no platform exists that succeeds in bringing these divergent efforts towards responsible Smart City innovation together in such a way that these can translate into corporate practice, government policy and public participation simultaneously. Nor are the existing proposals both flexible and robust enough in the context of constantly evolving techno-social systems.

Research aim

The ambition of this research project is to provide just that: informed by insights from the field of philosophy of technology, anthropology and ethics, it brings together (critical) engineers, public awareness partners, technical and management staff from Smart City corporations, educators and artists, and a wide variety of publics in order to pioneer and prototype  

1. an ethical framework for collaborative design on Smart City innovation projects,
2. a format for translating ethical values into technological design,
3. a format for a communication strategy that brokers these to different publics and
4. a certification tool that will be visibly embedded in Smart City systems and that will co-evolve along with the constant transformations of these systems.

Funding: NWO Maatschappelijk Verantwoord Innoveren (MVI)

Period: March 2015 - 2018

How do processes of development and social transformation shape human migration? More specifically, how does development affect the geographical orientation, timing, composition and volume of both internal and international migration?

The relation between development and human mobility is highly contested. While economic development in poor countries and areas is usually seen as the most effective way to reduce migration, other studies suggest that development actually increases migration. However, evidence has remained highly inconclusive so far because of theoretical and methodological limitations.

Development and human migration

This research develops new theoretical and empirical approaches to gain a fundamental understanding of the relation between development processes and human migration. While prior analyses focused on a limited number of economic and demographic ‘predictor’ variables, this project applies a broader concept of development to examine how internal and international migration trends and patterns are shaped by wider social, economic, technological and political transformations.

Methodology

This will be achieved through (i) theory-building (reconceptualising migration as an intrinsic part of broader development processes) enabling the formulation of appropriate hypotheses; (ii) quantitative tests drawing on new, innovative databases on international and internal migration flow and stocks; and (iii) mixed method case-studies of six countries (provisionally Brazil, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Italy, Morocco and the Netherlands) representing different development-migration trajectories over the 19th and 20th centuries.

This project is scientifically ground-breaking by fundamentally shifting our understanding of how long-term development processes shape human migration. This is also relevant for policy by challenging popular understandings of migration as a development failure and to make more realistic assessments of how future global change may affect migration.

Funding: ERC Consolidator Grant

Period: 5 years

This project seeks to analyse how Golden Dawn establishes political strongholds through local community organising and thereby radicalises urban neighbourhoods.

In a context of economic stagnation and political uncertainty, euroscepticism and nationalist sentiment have been growing, as has the appeal of Far Right parties and movements across Europe. From one country to the next, the financial and debt crises have played out in very different ways, whilst their impact has been particularly severe at the continent’s margins. In the case of Greece, where the last eight years have been marked by a crumbling economy, state and social fabric, the rise of the Far Right has been dramatic, as well as singular. Since 2012, the extreme right party Golden Dawn has been achieving unprecedented electoral success even as its leadership is on trial for criminal activities since late 2013. The party scores high in inner city and urban peripheries, particularly in former communist party strongholds in the western periphery of Athens where it is also more visibly active, through the provision of services and protection, but also through violent acts such as beatings and killings. This project seeks to analyse how Golden Dawn establishes political strongholds through local community organising and thereby radicalises urban neighbourhoods. The project asks how does extreme nationalism become engrained into everyday life and struggles, how it affects practices, daily geographies and more moderate forms of nationalism and in turn how is it “made banal”? By conducting a deep ethnography of Perama in the western periphery of Athens, this MSCA will, on the one hand, identify the strategies and practices that constitute far-right strongholds in Athens today. On the other hand, it will seek to explain how young adults become socialised into extreme nationalism and how xenophobia and violence can become trivialised. It will contribute to the study of social exclusion in Europe by analysing the extreme right’s political consolidation through local level activities and the growing appeal of the far right in a context of profound state crisis.

Period: August 1, 2017 - September 1, 2019

Funding: EU SYRMAGINE

Refugees’ attempts to flee to a certain country are usually preceded by imaginations about possible destination countries. These imaginations not only contribute to refugees’ decisions where to seek asylum but also have an effect on how refugees experience realities when they arrive in the destination country. The research project ‘SYRMAGINE – Syrian Imaginations of Europe’ focuses on how Europe is imagined by Syrians settling in two of Syria’s neighbouring countries (Lebanon and Turkey) and examines how their imaginations affect their attitudes to seek asylum in European countries.

SYRMAGINE understands ‘geographical imaginations’ of Europe as subjective human conceptions of a geographical location and stresses the differences between ‘imagined regions’ and reality. While the project focusses on imaginations of Europe, it also includes the perceptions of those who do not aspire to migrate further, imaginations of other destination countries and of a return to Syria in comparison. The project hence wants to analyse the complicated and conflicted perceptions of European human rights standards in the Middle East and aims at giving an insight into how Syrians in Lebanon and Turkey perceive the meaning of asylum, especially in comparison to the situation in their current place of settlement. The project adopts a mixed-method approach combining a survey (n=400-800), 40 semi-directive interviews and an online ethnography.

SYRMAGINE contributes to the academic literature on the active role of imaginations in refugees’ decision-making and has two main objectives: 1) to investigate the relation between refugees’ imaginations and decision-making and to study how the present country of residence compares to Europe (and other countries) as a destination choice, 2) to examine how refugees inform themselves about social and political realities in European countries.

Period: August 1, 2017 - September 1, 2019

Funding: EU SYRMAGINE

Why do residents in rapidly growing cities succeed or fail to secure amenities required for their health, dignity, and comfort?

While engineers might see this as a technical question, this project focuses on the social relations that form around and through the setting up and governing of amenities for clean water, waste disposal, and public space. The provision of these amenities, of paramount importance to people’s lives and prominent on the policy agendas of governments and development agencies, is patchy and checkered, especially in the rapidly growing cities of the developing world. Charting and explaining the uneven development of amenities is therefore a vital task. The project uses extensive meta-reviews of the literature and detailed case studies of Accra (Ghana) and Istanbul (Turkey) to identify the conditions and mechanisms that explain why some people and places have privileged access to high-quality amenities while other people and places do not. 

The project is innovative on several fronts. Theoretically, it synthesizes bodies of literature that have much to offer to the analysis of amenities – and uneven development more generally – but which, to date, have not been brought into conversation: urban studies, figurational sociology, and common pool resource literature. Methodologically, it combines ethnography and Qualitative Comparative Analysis, elaborating QCA to identify conditions and mechanisms to account for specific pathways, and using ethnographic methods to analyze processes of collective action that have so far mostly been addressed through experiments and simulations. Finally, the project promises to “deparochialize” the study of cities – it does not simply project theory on cities outside of the West but uses the cases to rethink two foundational issues in the social sciences: differences in the capacity for collective action, and the origins of inequality. 

Period: January 1, 2018 - December 31, 2022

Funding: NWO VIDI

An ethnographic research in the regenerating areas of Amsterdam-north. Linda van de Kamp focusses on the dynamics between old and new inhabitants, entrepreneurs, artists, welfare workers, religious groups, housing corporations and authorities in dealing industrial and cultural heritage, public rituals, and media and communication technology. Her aim is to rethink the role of culture in our cities beyond the dominant one-sided approaches of culture as creative expression or ethnic background, by taking into account the importance of life histories, social class, local-global connections, worldviews and the relationship with urban sites.

See our weblog:  ‘Opening-up neighborhoods’: the art of urban regeneration

Funding: NWO VENI

Period: 1-2-2015 to 31-1-2019

Small-scale and bottom-up initiatives, and incremental urban development dominate various political agendas. These initiatives, termed Community-Linked Incremental Urban Developments (CLIUDs) here, remain underexplored. CLIUDs evolve around the concept of 'linking social capital' with an emphasis on the capacity of citizens and community to engage with those in power. It remains unclear how these increasingly popular new initiatives and alliances connect with long-term social and spatial issues of accessibility, urban vitality, inclusiveness, sustainability and economic competitiveness. In fact, discrepancies exist between CLIUDs and the necessary level of scale, time frame and governance for resolving strategic urban challenges. 

R-LINK aims to find smart solutions to address economic, social and environmental challenges through spatial transformations via CLIUDs. These transformations through CLIUDs affect and contest conventional urban development and governance models, thus requiring new action perspectives for civil servants and other practitioners in urban development. R-LINK proposes to bridge the gap between the practice of large-scale, strategic urban ambitions and policies and that of the new alliances (government, market or citizen initiated) for CLIUDs.

R-LINK is designed in close collaboration with practitioners and relevant stakeholders. Its implementation brings together scientists, the public sector, civil society and market players. This ensures co-creation of new knowledge and a practical focus. At the same time, the multidisciplinary expertise within the consortium enables fresh intellectual and transdisciplinary insights to be developed on the issue of how to realize strategic urban ambitions through CLIUDs and how to improve existing practices.

Funding: NWO Smart Urban Regions of the Future (SURF).

Period: 1-4-2016 to 31-3-2021

This H2020 project brings together scholars from the exact sciences, social sciences, and humanities to develop theories, models, and methods to better understand political and cultural conflict. The project is directed by Eckehard Olbrich of the Max Planck Institute for mathematics in Leipzig and includes partners from Belgium, France, Sweden, Italy, and Germany;

Social media and the digitization of news and discussion fora are having far-reaching effects on the way individuals and communities communicate, organize, and express themselves. Can the information circulating on these platforms be tapped to better understand and analyse the enormous problems facing our contemporary society? Could this help us to better monitor the growing number of social crises due to cultural differences and diverging world-views? Would this facilitate early detection and perhaps even ways to resolve conflicts before they lead to violence? The ODYCCEUS project answers all these questions affirmatively. It will develop the conceptual foundations, methodologies, and tools to translate this bold vision into reality and demonstrate its power in a large number of cases.

ODYCCEUS stands for Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflict in European Spaces. The project seeks conceptual breakthroughs in Global Systems Science, including a fine-grained representation of cultural conflicts based on conceptual spaces and sophisticated text analysis, extensions of game theory to handle games with both divergent interests and divergent mindsets, and new models of alignment and polarization dynamics. The project will also develop an open modular platform, called PENELOPE, that integrates tools for the complete pipeline, from data scraped from social media and digital sources, to visualization of the analyses and models developed by the project.

More information: https://www.odycceus.eu/#content

Funding: EU Horizon 2020. FET Proactive – Boosting emerging technologies

Periode: 1-1-2017 to 31-12-2020

Confronting Obesity: Co-creating policy with youth (CO-CREATE) will work with adolescents to create, inform and disseminate policies to tackle obesity among their peers.

Confronting Obesity: Co-creating policy with youth (CO-CREATE) works with adolescents to create, inform and disseminate policies to tackle obesity among their peers. The project uses a societal systems approach to understand how factors associated with obesity interact at various levels. The project focuses on adolescence as a crucial age-group with increasing autonomy and soon to be the next generation of adults, parents and policymakers, and thus important agents for change.

CO-CREATE aims to involve and empower adolescents and youth organizations to foster a participatory process of identifying and formulating relevant policies, assessing the options with other private and public actors, promoting relevant policy actions and developing tools and strategies for implementation.

CO-CREATE partner organisations include university research departments, national public health institutions and a number of civil society organisations concerned with health policies and youth well-being. The project builds on existing initiatives and platforms, and constructs new opportunities for youth engagement in the issue and youth participation in democratic moves for advocacy and policy change.

Funding: EU Horizon 2020. Food Security – Resilient and resource-efficient value chains

Period: 1-5-2018 to 31-4-2023

EnGendering Europe’s Muslim Question seeks conceptualize, empirically ground, and consolidate a new way of thinking about Muslims and Islam in Western Europe. It does so through two deliberate strategies: First, by shifting the analytical and methodological focus from ‘the other’ (Islam and Muslims) to the ‘European self’. The study proceeds by (1) analyzing the problematization (understood in a Foucaultian sense, as the study of how and why social problems emerge) of Islam and Muslims in Western Europe; (2) carefully mapping out the resonances and differences with Europe’s Jewish Question (as a paradigmatic instance of a racialized minority in Europe); and (3) further thinking and accounting for the racialization of religion in Europe.

Second, by centering the analysis in gender and sexuality, given the salience of questions of gender and sexuality in Europe’s Muslim Question (e.g. debates on women’s rights, homosexuality) as well as the potential of gender analyses to generate new knowledge. This approach allows me to (1) unpack how gender and sexuality function as privileged terrains upon which Europe’s Muslim Question emerges, (2) trace how the Muslim Question lays bare existing contradictions of gender and sexuality in Europe, and (3) consider the effects of the Muslim Question upon existing regimes of gender and sexuality.

The project consists of elaborate conceptual work was as well as an ‘ethnography of a problematization’ (adapting Bowen’s ‘anthropology of public reasoning’), which includes critical discourse analysis of key texts in the realms of policy-making and public debate, as well as interviews with figures from those realms. I focus on three topics: gender segregation, violence against women, and tolerance of homosexuality. While Western Europe provides the overarching horizon of the project, the empirical analysis is focused on the Netherlands, with contrasting case-studies from France, Belgium, and Germany (with a similar percentage of Muslims, between 5%-9%).

Funding: NWO VICI

Period: 1-9-2018 to 31-8-2023