Families in the Netherlands consisting of individuals falling into a variety of racialized migrant categories, are often the focus of governmental scrutiny and scientific curiosity. These ‘migrant families’ are constructed in a variety of ways, all which make it possible to center them as the object of interventions aiming to address their assumed cultural distance and their ‘traditional’ way of life, often within the discourse of ‘integration’ and within government mandated civic integration programmes. The paradox arises when these migrant families, problematized in their traditionality, their ‘unmodernity’, are seen as a threat to the Dutch ‘modern’ families and what are seen as their own national Dutch ‘traditions’. Embracing ‘tradition’ is therefore simultaneously seen as a sign of a lack of progress when attributed to migrant families, while also seen as something which must be protected, as an inherent characteristic of national identity of the modern Dutch nation state. This paper aims to explore this paradox and the constructions of the modern and unmodern family by focusing on the everyday doing of these families, and how they are studied and described in a variety of knowledge production reports. The everyday, and the description and governance of it, is a site which contributes to the (re)production of the logics of modernity, yet it is often ignored or left unseen, perhaps because of its assumed mundanity. What hierarchical descriptions exist in these reports between migrant and Dutch families on how daily family life is organized, enacted in parent child interactions, in gender roles, in community involvement, in celebratory traditions, and in work/leisure activities? How do these everyday activities, act as signifiers of the extent to which the doing of modern values (such as equality, solidarity, participation, and freedom) are enacted in everyday life in migrant vs Dutch families. Understanding these constructions, and the role that scientific research publications play in (re)producing them, will be explored to better understand how the normalization of these logics set the stage for the further scrutiny and discipline of these migranticized families.
MULTIFILE
Paper presented at the 31st European Seminar in Ethnomusicology ESEM, Limerick (Ireland), 18/9/2015. This paper presents a case study of ‘Belinda’, a Dutch woman in her early sixties who considers herself at the same time as ‘un-musical’ and musically hyper-sensitive. She is neither an ‘outstanding performer’ nor a ‘maverick’, but rather an idiosyncratic example of late-modern (i.c. Dutch) everyday life musicality.Interesting as her particular case may be, the focus in this paper is theoretical and methodological. Through concisely discussing Belinda’s biography, I will be able to focus, theoretically, on using practice theory as formulated recently by German cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz as a possible foundation for studying music in late-modern western societies. Reckwitz considers culture as an inherently hybrid and dynamic arena of shared and contested individual understandings of the world, and sees practices – ‘ways of doing and saying’ – as the locus of culture. Methodologically, I posit – referring to Reckwitz but also to the seminal work of George Herbert Mead and others - that there is no need to think about the individual and the social as two mutually exclusive domains, but rather that the individual is inherently social and therefore the study of music in society (‘music as culture’; or maybe ‘ethnomusicology’) should base itself on a thorough micro-ethnographic study of individuals, rather than on more abstract groups, combining ethnographic methods with insights from qualitative sociology and Grounded Theory.The paper hopes to contribute to theoretical and methodological discussions in ethnomusicology. Because the study of ‘Belinda’ is a strong example of a study by a researcher who has been born and bred in the same context of ‘shared and contested ways of doing and saying’ as the researched, the paper also hopes to contribute to ideas about the methodological particularities of ‘ethnomusicology-at-home’ and about the potential value of ethnomusicological studies of late-modern musicality and musical late-modernity.
DOCUMENT
Individuals are increasingly confronted with ‘diseases of modernity’, such as stress and burnout. While insights from the work-family interface have mainly pointed towards demands and resources coming from the work and nonwork domains, the proposed multi-method PhD research project aims to contribute to contemporary scholarly and societal work-life and burnout debates by presenting an alternative theoretical lens on the development of mental health complaints in today’s society, especially among the younger Millennial generation. The project aims to shed light on how and why Millennial employees engage in a so-called ‘work/nonwork image (re)construction process’.The project will reflect on the following questions:How, why and when do individual workers engage in a process in which they construct their image(s) in the work and nonwork domains? What are the relationships, if any, between the image (re)construction process individuals engage in and potential positive- and negative consequences?The findings are expected to have important implications not only for preventive measures for individuals and organizations, but also for possible avenues for future studies. Project Partner: Nyenrode Business Universiteit
