8 Nederlanders and buitenlanders providing feedback on papers and presentations and setting up and engaging in valuable discussions.During my PhD I spent a few months on a research visit at University of California, Santa Barbara. I would like to thank Mary Bucholtz for receiving me, discussing my work with me, and putting me in contact with some of the amazing people working alongside her. Thank you also to Kevin Whitehead for inviting me to participate in his course in Conversation Analysis and providing me with valuable feedback on some parts of this dissertation, and to the folks in the graduate sessions for the data sessions.Thank you to my paranymphs! Daan, we started this journey at about the same time, thanks for supporting me across the finish line. Vicky, how lucky that you turned out to be in Maastricht at the same time as me, thank you for the dinners, drinks, and laughs.Of course, the non-academic support that I have been lucky to have has been at least as valuable. Pap, mam, Roos, en Lein, bedankt voor jullie oneindige steun, die soms vanzelfsprekend voelt maar dat niet is, en voor het vieren mijn successen, zelfs als ik die soms zelf niet als zodanig wist te herkennen. Felix, dat ik het eind van mijn PhD zo goed ben doorgekomen is voor een groot deel aan jou te danken. Bedankt voor je vertrouwen en liefde. Kelly, wat een geluk dat je, naast een geweldige vriendin, ook een talentvolle illustrator en designer bent -bedankt voor het vormgeven van de prachtige kaft van dit proefschrift. Veel dank aan mijn vrienden en vriendinnen, die, door tijd met mij te besteden, me motiveerden om elke keer met nieuwe moed verder werken aan dit project. Ook dankzij jullie ligt dit boek hier. Ik noem jullie hier niet allen bij naam, maar weet dat ik dankbaar ben voor jullie vriendschap. Thank you to my friends: by spending time together, putting things into perspective, and enabling me to think about other things, you have helped me write this book. I am grateful for your friendship.10 Nederlanders and buitenlanders 18 Nederlanders and buitenlanders Nederlander) to identify themselves and one another. In the current literature, ethnicity is often understood as a kind of identity. In the next section, I will therefore zoom in on approaches to ethnicity and ethnic identification.
Beyond constructivism in approaches to ethnicityApproaches to ethnicity have undergone developments similar to approaches to (other kinds of) identity as expounded in the previous section. Once, ethnicity was treated as a taken-for-granted and unquestioned category, and the study of it was characterized by a search for essences and definitions of certain 'ethnic groups.' This approach has been called essentialism and is premised on the idea that ethnicity is acquired through birth, represents a given characteristic of the social world, and that members of the same ethnic group are somehow 'essentially' similar to one another and different from members of other ethnic groups (Wimmer 2013). This position has largely been replaced with a more soci...