Migrants, welfare and social citizenship in postcolonial Europe

Abstract

ABSTRACT Welfare landscapes are key sites for the everyday enactment and negotiation of citizenship, but they have remained relatively marginal in debates about migrants’ belonging in postcolonial Europe. Drawing on ethnographic studies of Egyptian migrant parents’ engagements with the welfare state in Paris, Amsterdam and Milan, this paper examines how citizenship is enacted, negotiated and experienced in welfare encounters. In contrast to the racialised citizenship produced by public discourses and bordering institutions, such welfare encounters articulate a social citizenship built on the idea that all citizens and legalised residents have a right to social welfare. This social citizenship is worked out in concrete encounters that revolve around material provisions and assistance, which are often deeply personal and intimate. Such encounters do not transact abstract notions of the citizen but draw on dense ideas and valuations of good lives, roles, responsibilities and deservingness on the part of welfare actors and beneficiaries.