Networks of voluntary community work addressing the immigrant and refugee

by Bolette Moldenhawer

In many European countries we can identify post 9/11 efforts to preserve or reconstruct national- cultural identities in an era of globalization, economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment against which immigrants and refugees stand out as the cultural and social precariat generated by a coercive state approaches to the social ordering of ‘problem populations’. In Denmark, in particular, we have observed an increasingly ambiguous welfare regulation of immigrants and refugees that seems to be the effect of a supposedly escalating ontological insecurity of the welfare nation-state. The overall idea in this project is to depict and investigate new forms of voluntary community work addressing ‘problem populations’ and how the development of these forms is related to the welfare nation-state transformation processes. One more specific focus will be on the recruitment and training practices of immigrants involved in voluntary community work and what forms these involvements are taken as regards the refurbishing of the welfare nation-state.