State work and the testing concours of citizenship.

Anyone trying to be a citizen has to pass through a set of practices trying to be a state. This paper investigates some of the ways testing practices calibrate citizens, and in doing so, perform "the state." The paper focuses on three forms of citizenship testing, which it considers exemplary forms of "state work," and which all, in various ways, concern "migration." First, the constitution of a "border crossing," which requires an identity test configured by deceptibility. Second, the Dutch asylum process, in which "being gay" can, in certain cases, be reason for being granted asylum, but where "being gay" is also the outcome of an examination organized by suspicion. And third, the Dutch measurement of immigrants' "integration," which is comprised of a testing process in which such factishes as "being a member of society" and "being modern" surface. Citizenship is analyzed in this paper as accrued and (re)configured along a migration trajectory that takes shape as a testing concours, meaning that subjects become citizens along a trajectory of testing practices. In contributing both to work on states and citizenship, and to work on testing, this paper thus puts forward the concept of citizenship testing as state work, where "state work is the term for that kind of labor that most knows itself as comparison, equivalency, and exchange in the social realm" (Harney, 2002, pp. 10-11). Throughout the testing practices discussed here, comparison, equivalency, and exchange figure prominently as the practical achievements of crafting states and citizens.

Against 'immigrant integration': for an end to neocolonial knowledge production.

This paper, written on invitation by the editors of Comparative Migration Studies, is intended as a provocation piece for invited commentators, and more broadly for those working with, or concerned about, the field of immigrant integration research. It outlines an argument put forward in Imagined Societies. A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017) that 1) critiques immigrant integration research for bad (or lacking) conceptual work, specifically also in regard to the core sociological notion of 'society'; 2) argues that immigrant integration monitoring is a neocolonial form of knowledge intricately bound up with the contemporary workings of power, and 3) proposes social science moves beyond notions of 'immigrant integration' and 'society' towards an imagination against the grain that involves paying due attention to what happens when migrants move across social ecologies, without resorting to commonsense and/or policy categories in doing so.

Surveillance at sea: The transactional politics of border control in the Aegean.

The relationship between vision and action is a key element of both practices and conceptualizations of border surveillance in Europe. This article engages with what we call the 'operative vision' of surveillance at sea, specifically as performed by the border control apparatus in the Aegean. We analyse the political consequences of this operative vision by elaborating on three examples of fieldwork conducted in the Aegean and on the islands of Chios and Lesbos. One of the main aims is to bring the figure of the migrant back into the study of border technologies. By combining insights from science and technology studies with border, mobility and security studies, the article distinguishes between processes of intervention, mobilization and realization and emphasizes the role of migrants in their encounter with surveillance operations. Two claims are brought forward. First, engaging with recent scholarly work on the visual politics of border surveillance, we circumscribe an ongoing 'transactional politics'. Second, the dynamic interplay between vision and action brings about a situation of 'recalcitrance', in which mobile objects and subjects of various kinds are drawn into securitized relations, for instance in encounters between coast guard boats and migrant boats at sea. Without reducing migrants to epiphenomena of those relations, this recalcitrance typifies the objects of surveillance as both relatable as well as resistant, particularly in the tensions between border control and search and rescue.

Making climates comparable: Comparison in paleoclimatology.

This article foregrounds comparison as a key practice in science by discussing the case of chronological comparability in paleoclimatology. Based on an ethnographic study of a paleoclimate research project, I illustrate how paleoclimatologists are able to produce comparative data on and images of past climates through the use of 'proxies'. I focus on the calibration of a type of algae as a proxy for climate variables. Such comparability is one illustration of the myriad ways in which relatively standardized forms of comparison underlie conceptions of 'climate change' and of 'climate' itself. The work of comparison discussed here has relevance for a variety of practices of qualification, quantification, monitoring, and evaluation.

The sociologist and the state. An assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology.

This paper provides an assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology based on a reading of his posthumously published lectures on the state in Sur l'État. It argues that the state was a foundational element in Bourdieu's rendition of the symbolic order of everyday life. As such, the state becomes equally pivotal in Bourdieu's sociology, the applicability of which rests on the existence of the state, which stabilizes the social fields and their symbolic action that constitute the object of sociology. The state, which Bourdieu considers a 'meta'-ordering principle in social life, ensures that sociology has a well-ordered object of study, vis-à-vis which it can posit itself as 'meta-meta'. The state thus functions as an epistemic guarantee in Bourdieu's sociology. A critical analysis of Bourdieu's sociology of the state offers the chance of a more fundamental overall assessment of Bourdieu's conception of sociology that has relevance for any critical sociological perspective that rests on the assumption of a meta-social entity, such as the state in Bourdieu's work, as a final ordering instance.

The double helix of cultural assimilationism and neo-liberalism: citizenship in contemporary governmentality.

In this article the recent transformations of citizenship in the Netherlands are analysed in relation to a developing form of governmentality. We regard citizenship as a state regulated technique of in- and exclusion and a crucial instrument in the management of populations. Taking the Dutch contexts of immigration and integration as our case, we argue that cultural assimilationism and neo-liberalism appear in a double helix: they combine to form a new governmental strategy we call neo-liberal communitarianism. Neo-liberal communitarianism is the underlying rationale of a population management that operates both in an individualizing (citizenship as individual participation and responsibility) and a de-individualizing way ('community' at various aggregate and localized levels as frame of 'integration'). It thus combines a communitarian care of a Dutch culturally grounded national community - conceived as traditionally'enlightened' and 'liberal'- with a neo-liberal emphasis on the individual's responsibility to achieve membership of that community. 'Community' is thereby selectively seen as mobilized and present (when immigrant integration is concerned) or as latently present and still in need of mobilization (when indigenous Dutch are concerned). Concomitantly, a repressive responsibilization and a facilitative responsibilization are aimed at these two governmentally differentiated populations.