Investigating the crafting of new state-citizens arrangements

The project investigates the crafting of new state-citizens arrangements aimed at strengthening social resilience, to analyse their potential, dilemmas, and pitfalls, and to elucidate the requirements for the creation of more resilient and just state-citizen relations.

Yet these new state-citizen arrangements promise to strengthen the ability of communities to face adverse circumstances, however they often prove to be less collaborative, democratic, responsive and efficient, including in terms of costs, than was hoped. Building social resilience through new collaborative state-citizen arrangements, in which social professionals play a crucial mediating role, remains a promise rather than a tried and tested path.

In this context you will help us study how relations between state, civil society and citizens are re-imagined and refashioned in social resilience projects, including in gendered, classed and racialized terms.

How are relations between state, civil society, and citizens re-imagined?

We concretely examine how social resilience materializes in concrete, social interventions and projects developed by a range of social actors, from grassroots initiatives to more institutionalized neighbourhood teams. Social resilience projects develop and enact new state-citizen arrangements and represent important new directions in the Dutch welfare state, but we know little about the governing and community relations they bring about. How are relations between state, civil society, and citizens re-imagined in terms of responsibilities, agency and hierarchy? Do such attempts at crafting resilient state-citizen arrangements contribute to the replication of existing inequalities or the production of new ones?

Research possibilities

As a student researcher, you have the opportunity to become part of the research team consisting of Anouk de Koning (Principal investigator), Sabrina Rahmawan-Huizenga (postdoc researcher), Charlotte van der Veen and Yannick Drijfhout (PhD candidates). You will develop your own ethnographic research project together with one of our partners. Partners include, among others, the City of Amsterdam, Meldpunt Discriminatie Regio Amsterdam, ContourdeTwern (Tilburg), Sociaal Werk Nederland, Minsterie van Binnenlandse Zaken and Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Volksgezondheid.