Throughout Europe, refugees must participate in civic integration programs aimed to improve language and to have them learn and adopt the ‘European’ way of life. These programmes have been criticized for being restrictive, discriminatory and as negatively impacting on the lives of refugees. Our study aims to explore the Dutch civic integration programme at the level of discourse.MethodThis three-part critical ethnography explores civic integration in the Netherlands by drawing on Foucauldian and decolonial theories. Firstly, a critical discourse analysis of practice texts (course books, exams) explored how they present integration and the Other. Secondly, observations during integration courses and focus groups with staff will further explore how these concepts are shaped. Lastly, a variety of creative methods will be offered to refugees, exploring how they demonstrate their integration through everyday doing.Impact/ResultsResults of the first study demonstrate that texts are actively constructing an image of the unmodern Other, attributing inherently unmodern values and ‘ways of doing’ to them. This image is reminiscent of previous historical depictions of the Other; suggesting that colonial classifications have their afterlife in programs today. It demonstrates that Othering is an indestructible practice across time and across multiple levels of integration, from policy to practice.Conclusions/OutcomesThe discourse we use shapes our understanding of who belongs and who not. These understandings impact on the treatment of groups and their occupational possibilities. Analyzing discourses creates spaces for new narratives and for new understandings of integration.
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Blockchains draw everything they touch into a market logic. Is resistance possible?Activist and artistic engagements with blockchain technology point to (at least) threedifferent sets of tactics that aim to subvert this affordance of the technology. The firstis part of an accellerationist logic: riding the waves of capital until capitalism finallycrashes, funding alternative values with whatever profit was accrued while it lasted.The second are part of prefigurative politics: building alternative blockchain systems,often in the form of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, that perform adifferent kind of politics and social organization, for example cooperativism or self-organized art funding. Then, there are those that explore how blockchain’s logics canbe subverted to make space for different ways of relating in non-financial and more-than-human ways. In this short essay I would like to focus on this third tactic, and toexplore what it might mean, I've been inspired by Patricia de Vries’ take on “plot workas an artistic praxis” (2022) that builds on decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter describedas “the plot system” that represented small, imperfect corners of relative self-deter-mination within the larger context of colonial plantations (Wynter 1971, 96). De Vriesasks how artistic work, implicated as it is in institutional and capitalist logics, can per-form plot work to create space for relating outside of those logics. But before I adressthis question, it is important to understand what Wynter understands as the logic ofthe plantation.
After the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, a flourishing cultural scene was established in Croatia’s capital Zagreb. The scene calls itself: independent culture. In this book, Sepp Eckenhaussen explores the history of Zagreb’s independent culture through three questions: How were independent cultures born? To whom do they belong? And what is the independence in independent culture? The result is a genealogy, a personal travel log, a mapping of cores of criticality, a search for futurologies, and a theory of the scene.Once again, it turns out that localist perspectives have become urgent to culture. The untranslatability of the local term ‘independent culture’ makes it hard for the outsider to get a thorough understanding of it. But it also makes the term into a crystal of significance and a catalyst of meaning-making towards a theory of independent culture.
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