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.

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.

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.

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 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.