Introduction Special Issue “Paradoxical orders: Parenting encounters, the welfare state, and difference in Europe”

Abstract

This special issue examines welfare programs as sites where Europe’s increasingly diverse societies are being shaped and negotiated. It zooms in on parenting as a central governmental domain where concerns about, and hopes for, the future of society intersect with notions of citizenship, family care, welfare, and deservingness of public resources. In this introduction to the special issue, we draw out three paradoxical orders that shape the encounters between migrant parents and welfare actors we have studied. One is concerned with the tension between the universal and difference, the other with the re-articulation of the public and the private, and a third with irreconcilable social and institutional demands. This helps us understand how Europe’s diverse societies are being shaped on the ground, beyond the often strongly racialized, nationalist rhetoric that has come to dominate public debates.

Kinship Idioms and Care-Control Dynamics in Hungarian Co-ethnic Philanthropy

“…As a last remark, it must be stated that the phenomena analysed in this paper is far from unique in yet another sense: family metaphors and idioms of kinship may play a central role in the social construction and organisation of philanthropy in various ways. Such metaphors may be central, inter alia, in defining the recipients of philanthropic support, as for example the frequent case of support for families in material and economic disadvantage; or in defining the needs that must be helped and the helping activities, such as in case of offering professional parenting support through NGOs (de Koning et al, 2020). Family metaphors and idioms of kinship, furthermore, may also induce helping motivations based on donor's familial roles and identities, conceived as similar to potential recipients'such empathetic identification, based on shared motherhood has been explored in milk donation philanthropy , Oreg & Appe, 2021.…”

De værdigt trængende

“…Munck & Marschall, 2023 in press. ;Bregnbaek, 2022;de Koning et al, 2020;Thelen et al, 2014;Vollebergh et al, 2021).…”

Special Issue Introduction: Intimate Belongings—Kinship and State Relatedness in Migrant Families in Denmark

“…In recent decades, anthropologists have questioned the basic assumption that the state exists as a separate entity seemingly above and beyond society (Vollebergh et al 2021), proposing to understand the state as a hybrid and relational construct enacted in everyday life and across the private-official divide (de Koning et al 2020;Thelen et al 2014). In the context of European welfare states, this research has shown the development of novel policy paradigms that place the state in proximate relation to various subpopulations, producing intense, local state presence and intimate state-client relationships.…”

“…A dominant discussion within these new state and kinship anthropologies concerns the boundary work that takes place when norms, values and cultural ideals must be negotiated in inclusionary practices across the private-official divide (Gal 2002). Often boundary work is based on gendered, racialized, and classed understandings of social life (Vollebergh et al 2021), and imbued with interpersonal forms of exchange and affects (Marchesi 2020;Fortier 2010), morality (Weiss and Gren 2021;Zigon 2007) as well as imagistic notions of care (Mattingly and Grøn 2022) or control that flourish in families and the state. Thus, the boundary work that unfolds on the backdrop of state-family entanglements is based on multiple forms of belonging, and kinship belonging becomes nested within other forms of belonging, e.g., to the state, the nation, communities, or society at large (Gammeltoft 2018).…”