Racialised entanglements of teacher professionalisation and problematised immigrant schoolchildren: crafting a Danish welfare nation-state, 1970–2013

Abstract

Modern welfare states emerged as a response to the social question and were crafted through the educationalisation of society engendering a need for a variety of professionals who could take care of citizens of concern. This article revisits the social question in a post-1970 Danish context of a growing non-western immigrant and refugee population and increasing professional attention paid to the presence of immigrant schoolchildren as a new social problem. In particular, the article takes as its point of departure the educationalisation of this new social problem, often referred to in terms of “integration”. Hence, it examines the dispositions and capacities of teachers imagined to handle immigrant schoolchildren as objects of educational and societal concern. Moreover, it explores how these entangled processes of educational problematisations and teacher professionalisation embedded in visions of good citizens and a good society, ultimately fed into the crafting of a post-1970 Danish welfare nation-state. Deploying a governmentality perspective, the analysis is based on diachronic reading of three professional journals specialised in the topic of the education of immigrant schoolchildren (1980–2013), supplemented by the annual reports of the Royal Danish School of Education (1970–2000). The article suggests that the crafting of a Danish welfare nation state between 1970 and 2013 crystallised in entanglements of subtly racialised professional subjectification and educational problematisations of immigrant schoolchildren, inextricably linking public and individual welfare to citizens practising a “Danish way of life”.