PhD defence Nadine Louise Blankvoort

Keywords: Civic integration, Integration, Ethnography, Critical Discourse Analysis 

"Modern Citizens, Unmodern Others: Epistemic and Everyday Governance of Difference in Dutch Migrant Integration Practices"

This thesis argues that the idea of “integration” is built on deep-rooted assumptions about difference, the idea that migrants are somehow distant from an imagined, uniform “Dutch identity”, with “Dutch norms and values”.  The thesis examines how this idea is created and reinforced through everyday materials, such as language textbooks used in civic integration classes, as well as through government policy documents. These depictions of difference, often presented as simple descriptions of daily life, come to be accepted as facts rather than questioned as assumptions which reproduce hierarchies. The thesis also shows how academic research on integration can strengthen these narratives by treating “difference” as a measurable or objective reality. Together, these practices form a self-reinforcing system: the more precisely we define and measure migrant “difference,” the more the system sustains its own reason for existence — continually reproducing the very problem it claims to solve.        

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