Professional interventions as a state-crafting grammar addressing "the immigrant"

The project is a collective research project with funding from 'The Danish Council for Independent Research', covering the period 01.02.2013-31.12.2016.

Professional interventions have gained significant currency in today’s state practices. Professional interventions, which materialised in the post-WWII emergence of the universal welfare state, are pointed out as central means for forming the neoliberal states’ citizens in today’s era of globalisation and migration, but we still do not know how specific pedagogical interventions addressing “the immigrant” function as state crafting endeavours.

The objective of this project is both empirical and theoretical. First, the project seeks empirically to describe and understand how the transformation in professional interventions is related to historical processes of state transformation. The focus is on the changed character of professional pedagogical work in Denmark: from the universalistic welfare state’s interventions of civilisation as regards all to the neoliberal state’s disciplinary and moralising interventions explicitly targeting groups of deviating individuals, especially “the immigrant”.

Second, the project will develop original theoretical knowledge contributing to the research area of the sociology of professions, linking to conceptualisations from research areas of sociology of pedagogy, political sociology and immigration studies due to the historical processes of state transformation just mentioned.

The project consists of four sub-projects:

• Addressing the Other in the political-administrative field of the Danish welfare nation-state since 1945 by Bolette Moldenhawer

• Defining practices of the Danish welfare nation state, 1945-1970s by Christian Ydesen

• The field of welfare work addressing “the immigrant” by Trine Øland

• The Making of Educationally Manageable Immigrant Schoolchildren in Denmark, 1970-2013 by Marta Padovan-Özdemir

See also further details on the objective.

Advisory Board

The project has an advisory board consisting of:

• Professor Stephen Ball, Policy Studies at the Institute of Education, University of London
• Professor Ian Grosvenor, Urban Education History, School of Education, University of Birmingham
• Professor Ove Kaj Pedersen, Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School
• Professor Claire Schiff, Department of Sociology, University Victor Segalen-Bordeaux 2
• Professor Agnes van-Zanten, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.