Papers by Anick Vollebergh
Tijdschrift voor genderstudies, Dec 1, 2022
This articles gives insight into the ballroom scene in the Netherlands, in which queers of colour... more This articles gives insight into the ballroom scene in the Netherlands, in which queers of colour find a safe space that enables what they call individual 'transformation' towards becoming their 'free-selves'. During lessons and club events called 'balls' their performances are constantly evaluated and corrected, as co-students, teachers, audiences, and judges at the end of the runway exhort them to 'work' and 'fake it'. Understanding ballroom as a form of minoritarian liberalism, this article uses these phrases to explore through what precise operations of self ballroom generates a form of queer freedom. Drawing on postsecular theories of docility, imitation and agency, we show that the cultivation of queer 'freeselves' is arduous and requires incessant individual and collective disciplinary labour. By disciplining the body to the outer, scripted performance of alternative gendered ways of being, the inner self changes accordingly. It can become the free and confident self that the body has been taught to imitate and display. Ballroom's critical force does not lie solely in its queering of dominant constellations of sex and gender, but also in its queering of the operation and meaning of freedom.
American Anthropologist, Mar 11, 2019
Across Europe, ethnically diverse neighborhoods figure as key sites in racialized public debates ... more Across Europe, ethnically diverse neighborhoods figure as key sites in racialized public debates that imagine the nation as white and nonwhite citizens as foreign to the body politic. Drawing on research in Antwerp and Amsterdam, we examine how public discourses come to shape the lives of residents in such iconic sites. We propose the notion of ordinary iconic figures as a way to understand these connections. Ordinary iconic figures represent generic types that populate national narratives and connect the local and the national as well as the individual and larger categories. These figures come into being in public discourses but are taken up beyond the sphere of politics and media. Such ordinary iconic figures offer commonsense frames for understanding urban landscapes, carve out speaking positions, and come to haunt residents' sense of self as iconic shadows. They thereby help transport the inequalities laid out in public discourses into people's everyday lives. [urban anthropology, political anthropology, racialization, iconic figures, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Europe] RESUMEN A través de Europa, vecindarios diversos figuran como sitios claves en los debates públicos racializados que imaginan la nación como blanca y los ciudadanos no blancos como ajenos al cuerpo político. Basadas en investigación en Amberes yÁmsterdam, examinamos cómo los discursos públicos llegan a moldear las vidas de los residentes en tales sitios iconizados. Proponemos la noción de figuras icónicas ordinarias como una forma de entender estas conexiones. Las figuras icónicas ordinarias representan tipos genéricos que pueblan las narrativas nacionales y conectan lo local y lo nacional así como lo individual y categorías más grandes. Estas figuras llegan a existir en discursos públicos, pero se toman mas allá de la esfera de la política y los medios de comunicación. Tales figuras icónicas ordinarias ofrecen marcos de sentido común para entender los paisajes urbanos, tallar posiciones para hablar, y venir a atormentar el sentido de sí mismos de los residentes como sombras icónicas. Ellas por lo tanto ayudan a transportar las desigualdades presentadas en discursos públicos a las vidas cotidianas de las personas. [antropología urbana, antropología política, racialización, figuras icónicas,Ámsterdam, Amberes, Europa] NEDERLANDSE SAMENVATTING In heel Europa spelen grootstedelijke buurten met veel bewoners met een migratie-achtergrond een sleutelrol in geracialiseerde debatten over de samenleving. Op basis van veldwerk in Antwerpen en Amsterdam analyseren we hoe publieke vertogen de levens van buurtbewoners in dergelijke iconische buurten beïnvloeden. We introduceren het concept van de 'alledaagse iconische figuur' als een manier om deze verbanden te begrijpen. Alledaagse iconische figuren representeren algemene types waarmee verhalen over de natie verteld worden. Ze verbinden het lokale en het nationale, het individu en de categorie. Ze ontstaan in publieke
Radboud University Press eBooks, Jun 26, 2023
Soccer & Society
This article addresses the way in which female players of "traditional" amateur... more This article addresses the way in which female players of "traditional" amateur football clubs in the Netherlands manage to create their team as "open" and "inclusive". Drawing on the notion of playfulness and linguistic perspectives on humour, we show that women players engage in shared sexual joking and embodied performances that centre around gendered and sexual stereotypes and norms. In contrast to a reading of the persistence of norms as limiting anti-normative agency, a focus on play shifts attention to the active recontextualisation of norms in localized interaction and their "nested" quality-thus suggesting that norms are always imbricated in their alternative. It is through the subtle recoding of gendered and sexual norms and stereotypes Independent scholar accomplished in interactional forms of verbal and spatial play that team members recreate traditional club spaces, albeit transiently, into alternative sportscapes nested within otherwise strongly (hetero)normative spaces.
Soccer & Society, 2023
This article addresses the way in which female players of "traditional" amateur football clubs in... more This article addresses the way in which female players of "traditional" amateur football clubs in the Netherlands manage to create their team as "open" and "inclusive". Drawing on the notion of playfulness and linguistic perspectives on humour, we show that women players engage in shared sexual joking and embodied performances that centre around gendered and sexual stereotypes and norms. In contrast to a reading of the persistence of norms as limiting anti-normative agency, a focus on play shifts attention to the active recontextualisation of norms in localized interaction and their "nested" quality-thus suggesting that norms are always imbricated in their alternative. It is through the subtle recoding of gendered and sexual norms and stereotypes Independent scholar accomplished in interactional forms of verbal and spatial play that team members recreate traditional club spaces, albeit transiently, into alternative sportscapes nested within otherwise strongly (hetero)normative spaces.
Tijdschrift voor Gender Studies, 2022
This articles gives insight into the ballroom scene in the Netherlands, in which queers of colour... more This articles gives insight into the ballroom scene in the Netherlands, in which queers of colour find a safe space that enables what they call individual 'transformation' towards becoming their 'free-selves'. During lessons and club events called 'balls' their performances are constantly evaluated and corrected, as co-students, teachers, audiences, and judges at the end of the runway exhort them to 'work' and 'fake it'. Understanding ballroom as a form of minoritarian liberalism, this article uses these phrases to explore through what precise operations of self ballroom generates a form of queer freedom. Drawing on postsecular theories of docility, imitation and agency, we show that the cultivation of queer 'freeselves' is arduous and requires incessant individual and collective disciplinary labour. By disciplining the body to the outer, scripted performance of alternative gendered ways of being, the inner self changes accordingly. It can become the free and confident self that the body has been taught to imitate and display. Ballroom's critical force does not lie solely in its queering of dominant constellations of sex and gender, but also in its queering of the operation and meaning of freedom.
This book offers an ethnographic inquiry into the notion of ‘living together’ [samenleven], inves... more This book offers an ethnographic inquiry into the notion of ‘living together’ [samenleven], investigating its historical emergence and role in ‘culturalist’ and secularist politics in Flanders, as well as how it shapes everyday life in diverse urban neighborhoods. The term culturalism was coined to denote the exclusionary discourses that have emerged in postcolonial Europe positing migrants as cultural ‘strangers’ from which the nation and the perceived original, ‘autochthonous’ population need to be safeguarded. This book reveals how culturalism resulted in a new political project to ‘heal’ an assumed deficit of fellow feeling in multi-ethnic urban neighborhoods and a new political-ethical injunction for denizens to ‘live together’ with their ‘strange’ neighbors. The book focuses on two Antwerpean neighborhoods - Oud-Borgerhout and the ‘Jewish Neighborhood’ - and follows the neighborhood engagements of white Belgian, Moroccan-Belgian, and Jewish Belgian denizens. Due to the politic...
Ethnography, 2020
The discussion group is a common form of parenting support offered by associations in the pluri-e... more The discussion group is a common form of parenting support offered by associations in the pluri-ethnic, working-class neighborhoods of northeast Paris. Situated in a larger formation of voice that hails marginalized parents to speak, professionals engage with these discussion groups as potential social ‘transistors’: simultaneously circuiting parents’ voice inwards to restore parents’ agentive capacities and amplifying it outwards into an audible collective voice aimed at impacting state–citizen relations. In order to reach this double effect, professionals deploy ‘paralinguistic techniques’, which produce and combine intimate and civic, normative and alternative (semi-)public speech contexts. As a result, discussion groups emerge as pedagogical instances of a ‘Republican’ public sphere and its reworkings. Against the backdrop of anxieties of a disintegrating Republic and failing institutions, discussion groups highlight a desire for new conduits of citizenship, as well as the ways ...
American Anthropologist, 2019
Across Europe, ethnically diverse neighborhoods figure as key sites in racialized public debates ... more Across Europe, ethnically diverse neighborhoods figure as key sites in racialized public debates that imagine the nation as white and nonwhite citizens as foreign to the body politic. Drawing on research in Antwerp and Amsterdam, we examine how public discourses come to shape the lives of residents in such iconic sites. We propose the notion of ordinary iconic figures as a way to understand these connections. Ordinary iconic figures represent generic types that populate national narratives and connect the local and the national as well as the individual and larger categories. These figures come into being in public discourses but are taken up beyond the sphere of politics and media. Such ordinary iconic figures offer commonsense frames for understanding urban landscapes, carve out speaking positions, and come to haunt residents' sense of self as iconic shadows. They thereby help transport the inequalities laid out in public discourses into people's everyday lives. [urban anthropology, political anthropology, racialization, iconic figures, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Europe] RESUMEN A trav és de Europa, vecindarios diversos figuran como sitios claves en los debates p úblicos racializados que imaginan la naci ón como blanca y los ciudadanos no blancos como ajenos al cuerpo político. Basadas en investigaci ón en Amberes y Ámsterdam, examinamos c ómo los discursos p úblicos llegan a moldear las vidas de los residentes en tales sitios iconizados. Proponemos la noci ón de figuras ic ónicas ordinarias como una forma de entender estas conexiones. Las figuras ic ónicas ordinarias representan tipos gen éricos que pueblan las narrativas nacionales y conectan lo local y lo nacional así como lo individual y categorías m ás grandes. Estas figuras llegan a existir en discursos p úblicos, pero se toman mas all á de la esfera de la política y los medios de comunicaci ón. Tales figuras ic ónicas ordinarias ofrecen marcos de sentido com ún para entender los paisajes urbanos, tallar posiciones para hablar, y venir a atormentar el sentido de sí mismos de los residentes como sombras ic ónicas. Ellas por lo tanto ayudan a transportar las desigualdades presentadas en discursos p úblicos a las vidas cotidianas de las personas. [antropología urbana, antropología política, racializaci ón, figuras ic ónicas, Ámsterdam, Amberes, Europa] NEDERLANDSE SAMENVATTING In heel Europa spelen grootstedelijke buurten met veel bewoners met een migratie-achtergrond een sleutelrol in geracialiseerde debatten over de samenleving. Op basis van veldwerk in Antwerpen en Amsterdam analyseren we hoe publieke vertogen de levens van buurtbewoners in dergelijke iconische buurten beïnvloeden. We introduceren het concept van de 'alledaagse iconische figuur' als een manier om deze verbanden te begrijpen. Alledaagse iconische figuren representeren algemene types waarmee verhalen over de natie verteld worden. Ze verbinden het lokale en het nationale, het individu en de categorie. Ze ontstaan in publieke
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2022
In Antwerp, everyday interactions in ethno-racially diverse neighbourhoods have become the object... more In Antwerp, everyday interactions in ethno-racially diverse neighbourhoods have become the object of polarized debate and policy interventions that posit ‘living together’ as an ideal. Residents routinely use living together as a frame to assess themselves and their neighbourhood. They also bring divergent vernacular moral practices and sensory experiences to everyday interactions across difference. This complicates understandings of conviviality as a singular, demarcatable dimension of urban life. This paper delineates, instead, theoretical, methodological and textual manoeuvres for approaching conviviality in the plural. Methodologically, biographical interviewing and go-alongs are combined to explore diverging vernacular modes of engagement, and their intersections. Textually, the stylistic device of a collage of ‘mobile monologues’ – first-person, situated stream-of- consciousness narrations – works to recreate in writing a polyphony of embodied and moral modes of being, and their unfolding across myriad interactions. Finally, mobile monologues bring-out understudied dimensions of conviviality: (1) the situated performance of local narratives, (2) the circulation of moral economies of neighbourliness, (3) the contested political resignification of vernacular notions and practices in relation to discourses of living together. Conviviality emerges as heterogeneously assembled from a multiplicity of intersecting vernacular universes, whose political relevance in relation to living together is actively made and contested.
Digesting Difference. Migrant Incorporation and Mutual Belonging in Europe - Kelly McKowen & John Borneman (eds.), 2020
In Belgium, the rise of the Flemish populist far-right instigated the development of an affective... more In Belgium, the rise of the Flemish populist far-right instigated the development of an affective governance of neighborly interactions and civic dispositions in pluri-ethnic urban spaces. Taking as an extended case the development of a so-called diversity trajectory in Antwerp, this paper argues that this governance of samenleven (living together) co-opted the populist notion that 'everyday neighborhood life' of ‘ordinary people’ forms a distinct, authentic realm. This construction of everyday life generates contradictory governmental pushes and pulls – fascination, desire, suspicion, indifference - around different categories of residents and vernacular practices of incorporation, which I describe as an oscillation between Romanticist and Enlightenment affect. As a result, actually existing relations between white working-class and Moroccan-background residents – the residents whom governance actors deemed ‘ordinary’ and viewed as authentically immersed in neighborhood life – were unintelligible to governance actors as ethical practices in their own right and dismissed as deficient living together.
Current Anthropology, 2021
Across Europe, new welfare programs exemplify attempts to govern through community. This article ... more Across Europe, new welfare programs exemplify attempts to govern through community. This article asks how such governing through community is done in practice. Drawing on comparative insights from fieldwork with parenting support professionals and volunteers in Amsterdam, Milan, and Paris, we document not only how governing through community is actually done but also what new forms of entanglements and unruly effects such governing creates. We argue that intimate welfare landscapes organized at the scale of the neighborhood (1) entangle welfare actors in neighborhood-focused networked relationships; (2) tend to bridge, obfuscate, and dissolve boundaries between state agent and citizen and between state and society; and (3) rely heavily on affective labor and personalized relationships. We show that the reorganization of governance through neighborhood-based networks produces an unwieldy quagmire of networks and partnerships. Moreover, rather than creating self-caring communities, new welfare programs primarily draw increasing numbers into governmental roles. Finally, instead of being released from its welfare and social responsibilities, locally embedded professionals turn out to be particularly effective at bringing the welfare state back in.
Ethnography, 2020
The discussion group is a common form of parenting support offered by associations in the pluri-e... more The discussion group is a common form of parenting support offered by associations in the pluri-ethnic, working-class neighborhoods of northeast Paris. Situated in a larger formation of voice that hails marginalized parents to speak, professionals engage with these discussion groups as potential social 'transistors': simultaneously circuiting parents' voice inwards to restore parents' agentive capacities and amplifying it outwards into an audible collective voice aimed at impacting state-citizen relations. In order to reach this double effect, professionals deploy 'paralinguistic techniques', which produce and combine intimate and civic, normative and alternative (semi-)public speech contexts. As a result, discussion groups emerge as pedagogical instances of a 'Republican' public sphere and its reworkings. Against the backdrop of anxieties of a disintegrating Republic and failing institutions, discussion groups highlight a desire for new conduits of citizenship, as well as the ways in which marginalized residents are called upon to invest these with their voice.
American Anthropologist, 2019
Across Europe, ethnically diverse neighborhoods figure as key sites in racialized public debates ... more Across Europe, ethnically diverse neighborhoods figure as key sites in racialized public debates that imagine the nation as white and nonwhite citizens as foreign to the body politic. Drawing on research in Antwerp and Amsterdam, we examine how public discourses come to shape the lives of residents in such iconic sites. We propose the notion of ordinary iconic figures as a way to understand these connections. Ordinary iconic figures represent generic types that populate national narratives and connect the local and the national as well as the individual and larger categories. These figures come into being in public discourses but are taken up beyond the sphere of politics and media. Such ordinary iconic figures offer commonsense frames for understanding urban landscapes, carve out speaking positions, and come to haunt residents' sense of self as iconic shadows. They thereby help transport the inequalities laid out in public discourses into people's everyday lives. [urban anthropology, political anthropology, racialization, iconic figures, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Europe] RESUMEN A travéstrav´través de Europa, vecindarios diversos figuran como sitios claves en los debates p ´ ublicos racializados que imaginan la nací on como blanca y los ciudadanos no blancos como ajenos al cuerpo político. Basadas en investigací on en Amberes y ´ Amsterdam, examinamos c ´ omo los discursos p ´ ublicos llegan a moldear las vidas de los residentes en tales sitios iconizados. Proponemos la nocí on de figuras icónicasic´icónicas ordinarias como una forma de entender estas conexiones. Las figuras icónicasic´icónicas ordinarias representan tipos genéricosgen´genéricos que pueblan las narrativas nacionales y conectan lo local y lo nacional así como lo individual y categorías m ´ as grandes. Estas figuras llegan a existir en discursos p ´ ublicos, pero se toman mas alí a de la esfera de la política y los medios de comunicací on. Tales figuras icónicasic´icónicas ordinarias ofrecen marcos de sentido comúncom´común para entender los paisajes urbanos, tallar posiciones para hablar, y venir a atormentar el sentido de sí mismos de los residentes como sombras icónicasic´icónicas. Ellas por lo tanto ayudan a transportar las desigualdades presentadas en discursos p ´ ublicos a las vidas cotidianas de las personas. [antropología urbana, antropología política, racializací on, figuras icónicasic´icónicas, ´ Amsterdam, Amberes, Europa] NEDERLANDSE SAMENVATTING In heel Europa spelen grootstedelijke buurten met veel bewoners met een migratie-achtergrond een sleutelrol in geracialiseerde debatten over de samenleving. Op basis van veldwerk in Antwerpen en Amsterdam analyseren we hoe publieke vertogen de levens van buurtbewoners in dergelijke iconis-che buurten be¨ınvloedenbe¨ınvloeden. We introduceren het concept van de 'alledaagse iconische figuur' als een manier om deze verbanden te begrijpen. Alledaagse iconische figuren representeren algemene types waarmee verhalen over de natie verteld worden. Ze verbinden het lokale en het nationale, het individu en de categorie.
In this paper, Vollebergh investigates the commitment to establishing intercultural encounters by... more In this paper, Vollebergh investigates the commitment to establishing intercultural encounters by so-called ‘active’ white Flemish residents in Antwerp, and their perpetual disappointment with the responses of their neighbours of orthodox Jewish and Moroccan backgrounds. Instead of viewing these relationships either as a product of culturalist social cohesion policies, or as a vernacular ethical achievement that escapes culturalist politics, she argues that we should understand them through the figure of the Neighbour. Combining the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Žižek, she suggests that the neighbourly relation is a paradox in which the Neighbour as a nearby Other induces both an ethical desire for total openness in the engagement with this Other, as well as the uncanny sense that his/her Otherness haunts and makes impossible such an engagement. When viewed in this way, vernacular intercultural relationships, and the fantasies and frustrations surrounding them, emerge as the site where residents of multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in postcolonial Europe engage and struggle with existential and ethical questions of human interconnection and, especially, the effects of the culturalist inflection that these questions have gained.
Words Matter. An Unfinished Guide to word choices in the cultural sector. Wayne Modest and Robert Lelijveld (eds.), 2018
Books by Anick Vollebergh
Thesis Chapters by Anick Vollebergh
This thesis offers an ethnographic inquiry into the notion of ‘living together’ [samenleven], inv... more This thesis offers an ethnographic inquiry into the notion of ‘living together’ [samenleven], investigating its historical emergence and role in ‘culturalist’ and secularist politics in Flanders, as well as how it shapes everyday life in diverse urban neighborhoods. Culturalism has resulted in a new political project to ‘heal’ an assumed deficit of fellow feeling in multi-ethnic urban neighborhoods and a new political-ethical injunction for denizens to ‘live together’ with their ‘strange’ neighbors. Following the neighborhood engagements of white Belgian, Moroccan-Belgian, and Jewish Belgian denizens in two Antwerpean neighborhoods, I show that everyday neighborhood life has become a domain in which denizens are confronted with ethical and philosophical questions to which secure or comfortable answers are never found: about the nature and ethics of ‘objective’ perception; the diagnostics of strangeness; and the nature of fulfilled subject-hood and ‘true’ sociability. Denizens try to position themselves in relation to these questions through largely internal performative contestations - between so-called ‘old’ and ‘new Belgians’, ‘modern’ and ‘pious Jews’, ‘decent’ and ‘bad Moroccans’. Tracing these negotiations, this book pushes for an understanding of the impact of culturalism in contemporary Europe that complicates and disrupts the seeming dominance of the allochthon-autochthon divide.
Conference Presentations by Anick Vollebergh
EASA Belfast , 2022
This panel aims to engage critically with the circulation of bodies within and between state inst... more This panel aims to engage critically with the circulation of bodies within and between state instantiations, writ large, to theorise state power. Ethnographically examining movement within and between such entities allows us to expand considerations of circulation as a possible mode of governance.
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Papers by Anick Vollebergh
Books by Anick Vollebergh
Thesis Chapters by Anick Vollebergh
Conference Presentations by Anick Vollebergh