Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
‘If they do not want us in, we will not go out’! Sjaan exclaimed to the welfare practitioner. Like every week, Sjaan came to the community center, to prepare for the women’s club. But today she discovered that the locks were being changed and that she would not receive a key! The community center was no longer the same since the welfare organization took over the ‘club’ citizens ran for years. When they were still running ‘the Cockpit’ – as they called their club – the group from the infamous lower-working class Schilderswijk neighborhood was in charge of neighborhood activities. From the local municipality, they received support, subsidies, and space. But after a few years the club had to ‘professionalize’ and the founders were deemed volunteers. Now the welfare organization went too far! Could they not even enter their club on their own terms? They did not accept that! So, Sjaan called Tall Harry, Tall Harry called Manus, and Manus called others who instantly packed their bags and marched to the center. Armed with matrasses and sleeping bags they occupied the building. Others from the neighborhood brought them food and drinks. The occupation reverberated their community spirit, for a short moment they were back in their old and beloved roles as community leaders. But after a few days nothing happened. Nobody showed up. The welfare organization did not send anyone to talk to them. Nobody from the municipality came to kick them out of the public building. And even the police did not show up to arrest them! After some time, the group disappointedly withdrew.
This vignette provides an insight into a street-level drama in a neighborhood of The Hague, the Netherlands. It tells a story of a group of lower working-class people, who identify themselves as active citizens, and a local government, which was committed to citizen participation but nonetheless incapable of recognizing its people. After years of fighting for what they termed their ‘club,’ citizens occupied the building. There was no fight, no obvious violence, no arrests. Why then is this vignette so painful? My analysis indicates that it is because there was no response at all. These people were completely ignored by the same local government that had invited them to participate. The citizens described being ignored as the most painful form of misrecognition they experienced during their involvement in running the club.
Ironically, these events took place in a context of participatory governance (Blijleven and Kooiker, 2022; WRR, 2012). As a response to a ‘democratic deficit,’ the Netherlands (but also many other local and national governments, international organizations, and NGOs) embraced the theory and practice of participatory governance (Fischer, 2012: 458; Kymlicka, 2002). Participatory governance seeks to move beyond the representative model of democracy – in which citizens’ roles are limited to voting – to include direct engagement. Public policy literature defines participatory governance as a subset of governance theory that emphasizes citizens’ democratic engagement in order to distribute political power more equally (Fischer, 2012: 457). Citizen engagement holds great promise for more inclusive democracies, but studies show that the inclusion of stakeholders – especially among marginalized, socially excluded, and disadvantaged groups – remains more an exception than the rule (Osmani, 2008: 1) Consequently, citizens and ambitious state actors having experienced deep disappointments in attempting participatory governance. Citizens report feeling neglected, misrecognized, and even excluded from processes into which they were invited (Bartels, 2018; Conrad et al., 2011; Sénit, 2019). How to make sense of participatory processes that ultimately exclude the very people they intend to engage?
Public policy literature analyzes this dilemma in terms of institutional frameworks (Innes and Booher, 2010). Hajer and Wagenaar argue that participatory practices exist in an ‘institutional void’ that lacks clear rules (2003). Planning scholars have described a post-political contemporary condition in which participatory innovations merely pay lip service to citizens (Swyngedouw, 2005). Highlighting how including and excluding mechanisms are inherent to deliberative approaches, they offer an agonistic approach as an alternative (Metzger et al., 2014). These studies are helpful in understanding the contextual institutional factors and practices of governments, but they overlook the tacit and informal ways by which the citizens (such as those involved in my opening vignette) are excluded.
Scholars in this journal have shown that everyday practices of citizenship fall short of the standards policymakers prescribe (Bartels, 2018; Cao, 2022; Hoekstra, 2018). Participatory governance’s understanding of citizenship is often narrow, framing the good citizen by specifying appropriate norms, values, and behavior (De Koning et al., 2015). Lamont et al. show that even were emancipatory policies and campaigns to redistribute power and wealth equally and recognize difference evenly, everyday interactions would still be fraught with misrecognition, discrimination, and exclusion (2016). In quotidian interactions among citizens and state actors, the quality of democracy is hanging by a thread. A state’s ability to recognize expressions of identity and difference in public has implications for the quality of democracy (Benhabib, 1996; Young, 2000). It is therefore in the micro-politics of social interactions among citizens and state actors that the recognition of one’s identity, acknowledgment of pluralism, and redistribution of power and resources – or the lack thereof – are experienced and embodied.
Hence, I argue that scholars concerned with participatory community development, planning, and policy processes should develop an eye for the micro-politics of citizen-state interactions. To better understand these interactions and the processes of inclusion and exclusion that participation involves, I turn to the extensive scholarly literature on the politics of recognition. Recognition is considered a central notion in emancipatory philosophy, for ‘it is in the terms of the denial of recognition that the conditions for achieving a good life are grasped’ (Genel et al., 2016: 15). A relationship or behavior in which one is not recognized in fact entails a
The Dutch context is especially interesting in this connection. It has a long tradition of mounting spatial interventions at the neighborhood scale, often involving high ambitions for including citizens (De Wilde and Duyvendak, 2016). In the period of this case study – between 2002 and 2013 – the Dutch government launched a national policy scheme to stimulate and support active citizenship in neighborhoods (WRR, 2012). Local governments adopted participatory governance approaches in roughly two domains: community development (Verhoeven and Tonkens, 2013) and planning and policymaking processes (Akkerman et al., 2004). These ambitions remain equally important in local government strategies today (Blijleven and Kooiker, 2022). To avoid future exclusions, it is important to investigate why previous cases resulted in misrecognition.
In what follows, I will unravel tactics of ‘ignoring people’ as a socio-spatial practice of politics. Through an ethnographic case study, I identify these five mechanisms by which state actors ignore people: disregarding their story; omitting their history; neglecting their speech acts; disdaining their emotions; and being spatially absent from protest. To come to these conclusions, I first discuss philosophical approaches to the politics of recognition, enumerating five insights by which these theories can help explain the micro-politics of misrecognition in interactions among citizens and state actors. Second, I will briefly discuss the ethnographic research methodologies that I used to research the case study introduced in the vignette above. Third, I present that ethnographic case study by narrating three critical moments in a sequence of events in the development of this participatory community building process. Finally, I offer theoretical reflections on the micro-politics of misrecognition and discuss how my analysis in this study contributes to critical scholarship on recognition and participatory governance.
Recognition and political agency in micro-interactions
The most important theoretical debate about recognition took place between Nancy Fraser (2000) and Axel Honneth (1995), who assumed different views on the meaning of recognition in modern struggles for justice. They agree that campaigns for recognition are of paramount importance and that the notion of recognition is not only economically significant – in terms of redistributing resources and power – but also has cultural import – in terms of individual or group identities being equally recognized. Their understandings of recognition differ, however. Honneth conceives recognition as an overarching moral category, of which redistribution is a subcategory (Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 3). Fraser warns that this perspective might reduce social oppression to psychic harm, arguing that redistribution should not be subsumed under recognition (McNay, 2008). The claim for recognition should not displace the politics of redistribution, which would increase economic inequality and reify group identities, thus risking violations of human rights (Fraser, 2000: 109). These philosophical debates contribute to a deep understanding of the macro-politics of recognition. They reveal how citizen-state interactions might precipitate or hamper structural change. They say little, though, about how misrecognition is performed, perceived, and interpreted at the micro-level of social interactions between citizens and state actors. Therefore, I now turn to debates on recognition in critical scholarship, delineating five important insights that help in analyzing everyday practices of recognition.
The first insight stems from McNay’s rethinking of the concept of recognition (2008). She argues that Fraser’s critique of Honneth’s subjectivist construal of recognition is largely justified, but adds that Fraser’s ‘non-identitarian’ account entails abandoning an experiential or interpretive perspective. For this reason, it is unable to explain the emergence of agency (McNay, 2008: 272). To mitigate the objectivism of Fraser’s paradigm and Honneth’s phenomenological ontology, which emphasizes the meaning of ‘experience,’ McNay offers a social theory based on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. This approach makes it possible to analyze the experience of social suffering and misrecognition in relation to the underlying power structures that shape them. McNay’s approach also fosters a focus on practice. In her view, emotions and oppositional consciousness are created by intentionally engaging with other individuals and social structures. In that sense, they emerge through action (McNay, 2008: 279). This highlights how related acts of creative agency take shape in what Bourdieu has called the ‘margin of freedom’ (Bourdieu, 2000). Agent-centered and praxeological, McNay’s approach is useful for analyzing the micro-politics of misrecognition because it treats subjectivity as an effect of power relations without relinquishing the phenomenological experience of oppression and agency.
Drawing on McNay (2008), I apply an agent-centered and practice-orientated approach to studying recognition, which focuses on small-scale interactions. This scale is even more ‘micro’ than that of Ben-Arie and Fenster’s micro-geographic analysis of addresses in Jaffa (2020). The scale I analyze here comprises social interaction, namely speech acts and emotional expressions. Speech acts are unique units of analysis for studying recognition in action because, unlike other analytical categories, they imply expectations of reactions and thereby bind actions and individuals. ‘Actions that include speech acts have a specific intention, they are oriented to a particular outcome’ (Zierhofer, 2002: 1355). Analyzing interactions between state actors and citizens through speech acts helps establish when claims to validity are met or not. ‘The concept of validity claims captures exactly that specific form of intersubjectivity which intends the coordination of actions’ (Zierhofer, 2002: 1363). When the intentions articulated in a speech act are not fulfilled, one can speak of misrecognition. Still, to focus solely on language would be to neglect emotions, which are to key shaping relationships among state actors and citizens (Ahmed, 2014; McNay, 2008; Mouffe, 2005). To complement that focus with an understanding of emotional expressions, I listen to not just what people say but also how they say it. In sum, I propose an agent-centered, practice-oriented approach to recognition that focuses on agentive expressions of emotions and utterances during interactions between individuals – in this case citizens and state actors – without ignoring the underlying power structures that limit spaces of agency.
One way to account for existing power structures when analyzing agency is to attend to institutionalized patterns of social subordination (Fraser, 2000). Institutional patterns affect social actors’ relative standing. Fraser argues that ‘parity of participation’ should be normalized. As Markell explains, ‘that norm “requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with each other as peers,” and it has both “objective” conditions, involving the distribution of wealth and other resources, and “intersubjective” conditions, involving the institutionalized patterns of value that assign (or fail to assign) people the status of peers’ (Fraser in Markell 2008: 458). When actors are constituted as peers, participating equally in social life, reciprocal recognition and status equality prevail. But when some actors are less than full partners in social interaction – when they are understood or treated as inferior, excluded, other, or simply invisible – then one can speak of misrecognition (Fraser, 2000: 113). The second theoretical lesson I draw, then, is that a micro-perspective on recognition should understand institutionalized patterns and how they variously enable and prohibit equal participation.
Third, grasping the relationship among micro-interactions and larger power structures entails understanding discrimination and stigmatization. Lamont et al. (2016) convincingly argue that categorical exclusion is predominantly experienced in everyday incidents in which stigmatization, despite not immediately translating into discrimination, diminishes a person’s worth. They explain these moments of misrecognition using a theory of ‘groupness,’ coming to the conclusion that the micro-politics of recognition are shaped less by the strength of groupness and brightness of boundaries, ‘but rather the “grounds of differences”’ (Brubaker, 2015). This concept sheds light on the complex relationships among citizenship, national belonging, rights, and social inclusion. Lamont et al. take up this notion to show that there are many variations of stigmatized groups, which are not necessarily limited to given ethno-racial or national subjectivities (Lamont et al., 2016: 286). This is an important lesson because I examine a case study in which people rearticulate their own and others’ identities through particular encounters (Ben-Arie and Fenster, 2020: 406). Here, the grounds of difference are neither ethnic nor racial, but involve locally construed differences among neighbors who share a national and racial identity, despite having varying class and lifestyle backgrounds.
Fourth, adopting an agent-centered, practice-oriented approach to recognition requires an Arendtian understanding of democratic citizenship. For Arendt, the political realm comprises ‘spaces of appearance.’ Politics is the process of inserting oneself into an arena in a way that constitutes that arena as public and political: ‘The political realm rises directly out of acting together, the sharing of words and deeds’ (1958: 198). From this perspective, citizenship includes acts, gestures, and words that negotiate the value of human life in various relationships (Häkli and Kallio, 2014). This understanding treats all actors who engage with others as political actors in the public sphere. The biggest threats to democracy for Arendt are indifference to these political performances and the exclusion of groups from the public realm (1958: 9).
Fifth, critical geographers have enrolled a similar understanding of citizenship in studying recognition, but extended its scope to address contextuality (Kallio, 2017; Laitinen, 2002). What is to be recognized, they argue, does not exist and cannot be known in the abstract. Instead, ‘only the subjects involved may know and term the “stakes” of recognition and what feels “right” or “wrong” in a given situation, yet including their agencies as conditioned by the geosocial realm where they dwell (polis)’ (Kallio, 2017: 93). Kallio thus indicates the spatial dimension of political agency. This spatial element is especially important in an analysis of the micro-politics of misrecognition, which always involves subjects in particular places at particular times. The details of these times and spaces influence what is at stake for various actors and how (mis)recognition is performed and received. Spaces are not merely containers of interactions; they shape
On methodology
My analysis of the case study developed below draws on 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork. I used ethnography because it allows one to access experiences and emotions in ongoing interactions (Verloo, 2020). By observing interactions, one can attend closely to the role of emotions in the formation of responses to incidents and how responses evolve over time (Lamont et al., 2016: 288). Building on the recommendation that ethnographers should study ‘the details of interactions in the context of the broader narratives of misrecognition’ (Lamont et al., 2016: 287), I both observed ongoing social interactions and reflected on them in the form of accounts narrated by the actors involved.
Although this is a case of participation in community development, in my ongoing research on participatory planning I have discerned similar mechanisms (Verloo, 2021). Furthermore, work on other contexts in the Netherlands (e.g. Verloo, 2017; Bartels, 2018; Hoekstra, 2018; Visser et al., 2021) and other countries (e.g. Chorianopoulos, 2009; Legacy et al., 2019; Monno and Khakee, 2012) suggests that insights from this case study are transferrable to other processes of participatory governance. The community development studied here therefore functions as a ‘critical case study’ that has strategic importance in relation to a general problem (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 292). Such cases can be identified by the principle that ‘if it is valid for this case, it is valid for many cases’ (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 230). This critical case study shows how participatory processes and engagement with citizens can devolve into caricatures of themselves.
My ethnographic fieldwork entailed following citizens of various local groups, local civil servants, professionals from the welfare organization, and police officers in their everyday routines. To situate emotions and utterances that comprise the micro-politics of interactions within these actors’ narratives of the participatory process at large, I combined narrative interviews and participant observations. Narrative interviewing is a methodological technique for gathering ideographic storylines that reconstruct events chronologically and reveal the interviewees’ subjectivities and experiences (Bruner, 1991). Participant observations result in ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973) of interactions, enabling me to approximate idiosyncratic experiences of events and the meanings they are given. This combination allowed me to validate findings in two ways. First, by gathering actors’ verbal accounts of how they emotionally experienced the observed events, I could understand a single interaction through the multiple and often contradicting perspectives of those involved. Second, first-hand reports of attitudes and behaviors are inconsistent and thus of limited value in explaining what people actually do (Jerolmack and Khan, 2014: 179). To avoid conflating talk with action, I observed participants in and around the community center.
Between 2009 and 2013 I undertook ethnographic fieldwork, studying state-citizen interactions through structured participant observation in a given neighborhood and a community center in particular. After 2013, I followed developments in the neighborhood while I shadowed (Gill et al., 2014) a local professional. He had developed a narrative-based listening practice, which changed the relationship between citizens and state actors by temporarily allowing citizens more autonomy (for an extensive analysis of this period, see Verloo, 2015; Forester et al., 2021). After this phase, I closely followed news regarding the neighborhood (Verloo, 2019) and policy conflicts in the city in which it is located (Verloo, 2018a). Through 25 narrative interviews, I learned of events that happened before I entered the field. Through my ethnographic work and subsequent observation, I came to understand the meanings that local actors ascribed to unfolding events, allowing me to reconstruct this as a ‘critical case study,’ able to speak to other cases of participatory governance.
I compared the stories and observations of citizens and state actors to grasp how they differed and overlapped. To analyze the micro-politics of (mis)recognition, I identified ‘critical moments’ in a sequence of events between 2004 and 2013. Critical moments can be understood as turning points in a process that shape and change the relationship among actors and the meaning of events (Cobb, 2006). Analyzing critical moments reveals how state actors and marginalized groups express their politics. Analyzing critical moments makes it possible to set boundaries to one’s unit of analysis in terms of time, space, and action (Verloo, 2018b). Defining critical moments in this way allows one to analyze affective interactions between citizens and state actors.
Empirical practices of misrecognition
Introduction to the case study
The case study takes place in the neighborhood of Ypenburg, a new town development in The Hague. Ypenburg was constructed as part of a policy program (
In the late 1990s, a group of six families, which had lived in The Hague’s Schilderswijk neighborhood for generations, were invited to consider moving into newer, bigger houses in Ypenburg. Schilderswijk is a lower-working-class neighborhood in The Hague’s center. In 2005, 72% of its housing stock was social rent (compared to 32% in The Hague as a whole), 52% of its inhabitants have a lower level of education (against 32% in The Hague), with 42% living on the minimum wage (against 15% in The Hague) (The Hague Municipality, 2005a). Schilderswijk has been considered a problem neighborhood for decades (Bruijn, 2012). Its negative reputation is offset by its longstanding community traditions and active community life. The families who moved to Ypenburg associate their identity as ‘Schilderswijkers’ with these community bonds and their role in organizing local activities.
When the first families arrived in Ypenburg, much of the neighborhood was still under construction. Some residents from Schilderswijk assumed the task of arranging community activities. 1 They began to plan a neighborhood center to keep children and youngsters off the street and entertain adults through social activities. They organized children’s activities, karaoke, bingo for the elderly, and a club where fathers could play cards. The municipal government provided an old trailer in which to host neighborhood activities. The new residents called it ‘the cockpit,’ alluding to a former airfield on the site. According to one of the founders, the cockpit quickly became the new neighborhood’s central feature: ‘many different people came over, everyone wanted to be part of it [the cockpit] and help out.’ They designed a logo and ensured there were activities at set hours.
The story of the cockpit’s founders – later called ‘the cockpit group’ – is based on this local history. It construes their identity as active citizens, willingly engaged in community development, who transposed experiences from their previous neighborhood Schilderswijk to create a sense of ownership over their new living environment. This narrative endows the cockpit with meaning, presenting it as the neighborhood’s ‘parochial’ public space (Lofland, 1998: 10), which tacitly served the community’s development. The cockpit was a parochial space because it produced ‘commonality between neighbors who are involved in interpersonal networks that are located in communities’ (Lofland, 1998: 10). At the heart of this storyline, then, is the club’s public meaning and the locals’ identity as active citizens organizing events for their community.
Critical moment 1: Misrecognition through storylines
The emergence of another storyline contested the cockpit’s significance as a parochial realm. Some years after the cockpit opened, there was an administrative change whereby the city administration of The Hague absorbed the neighborhood. Now an official district, it had a separate local governmental body with responsibility for local community activities, maintaining public spaces, and security. The council immediately encountered a problem, a local civil servant explains: …there was a voluntary group who got quite a sum of money from the [former] local government. They organized all [community] activities. But what we heard was that this was only for a very specific group of people. (personal communication)
This narrative established a ground of difference (Lamont et al., 2016) between citizens in the cockpit group and other citizens in the neighborhood. Local officials interpreted the cockpit as a private space, ‘only for a very specific group of people,’ that is, those from Schilderswijk. A local police officer explained this difference by saying that ‘people from Schilderswijk are naturally a closed community that do everything by themselves. With their own club, their own activities, and their own subsidies and they determined what was happening in the neighborhood’ (personal communication).
This difference was only accentuated as the storyline developed, with a local police officer explaining that [the cockpit] was a sort of domain of bandits that nobody had anything to do with and where the residents could do whatever they wanted and also their children… that period of the cockpit is understood as the time in which all the problems originated. (personal communication)
The evocative phrase ‘terrain of bandits’ alters the space’s meaning, redefining it as private, not public. As such, the cockpit was no longer deemed a legitimate place for community activities. Private spaces are characterized by ‘ties of intimacy among primary groups members who are located in households or personal networks’ (Lofland, 1998: 10). The state actors’ narrative disregarded the cockpit group’s self-proclaimed role as leaders, improvised forms of community participation, and creation of a parochial space. At this point, that narrative became dominant. Dominant narratives produce power relations on the ground given that they are likely to be accepted as ‘real’ or ‘true’ (Bamberg, 2004). Further, they tend to exclude alternative narratives from the public sphere.
This recasting of the cockpit as a private space contradicted The Hague’s political ambition to foster bottom-up activities in which professionals and citizens cooperated to stimulate community development. If this agenda was to be feasible, it required the participation of the cockpit’s group of active citizens, who had experience in organizing the neighborhood’s informal community center. Their participation, however, was only allowed under the conditions set by the local government. These factors created a situation of institutional interdependence involving the local government, welfare professionals, and the cockpit group: the group was expected to participate, but only in a public center where they would work under professional supervision.
This interdependence also meant that the cockpit group did not simply withdraw from discussions concerning the center. They continued developing tactics to influence decisions and tell their story. Sjaan, one of the cockpit’s founders, explains: ‘first we were to have a space and later not anymore. But because we tried talking and other efforts, they could not just ignore us.’ They developed a counter-narrative that charged the cockpit with positive memories and public significance. This narrative, however, was not widely accepted as an interpretation of what is at stake, for it was told by a marginalized group of citizens, relatively lacking in power (Bamberg, 2004; Talbot, 1996).
The state actors disregarded this counter-narrative and enforced the dominant story, which had immediate implications. On 28 January 2004, there was an opening party for the new community center. The local government hired a welfare organization specialized in managing community centers and facilitating community activities. They formulated a strategy to actively ‘forget’ the cockpit in the new community center: We wanted to get rid of the stigma of the cockpit group. We now had the new center. We did not want it to be related to the cockpit, because it had such a negative image in the neighborhood. People said: ‘oh those are the old “cockpitters”, we don’t want to have anything to do with them’. (personal communication)
This strategy sought to shake off the negative stigma associated with the old club. To prevent residents from identifying the new center with the cockpit, the local government proposed not just to disregard elements of the received narrative of the cockpit, in which members of its group were cast as active citizens seeking to build community, but to omit that history from the new community center.
Critical moment 2: Misrecognition through speech acts
The strategy of ‘forgetting’ the cockpit’s history had immediate implications for interactions among citizens and professionals. Given the local government’s participatory ambitions, professionals and the cockpit group had to interact to organize activities in the new center. To accommodate that ambition without giving the group ownership, the professionals changed how they referred to the group. No longer ‘the cockpit group,’ they were now to be called ‘volunteers of the new center.’ As a local policy practitioner responsible for citizen participation explained, the ‘new center was much more positive, so we forgot about the cockpit and called them the volunteers of the new center’ (personal communication).
Whereas citizens reminisced about what they had lost, welfare practitioners were assigned to ‘forget’ that history and focus on their professional position. I observed the following conversation between the new center’s manager and a ‘volunteer’ who had belonged to the cockpit group: Professional: “I think as a welfare worker we have a pedagogical responsibility. Don’t you think?” Volunteer: “I think it is simply ‘gezellig’ and we get energy from it because we enjoy eating together and hanging out together. I just aim at ‘gezelligheid’, and that is what we always created.” Professional: “The welfare facilities in The Hague cover a wide spectrum, that means that you do not simply have a ‘cluppie’ that organizes Bingo, but there is also help with childcare, social support, and all sorts of important activities.”
The manager’s comments refer to the requirement that community activities be ‘for everyone.’ This dominant narrative had been established by the authorities. He gives this narrative another dimension by establishing that he has been endowed with ‘pedagogical responsibility.’ There was to be a new repertoire of community activities in the center, beyond bingo games. In his description of the shift toward new activities, the center’s former manager used the Dutch term ‘
Sjaan explained that she aimed to create ‘gezelligheid,’ a Dutch expression referring to a warm and cozy environment in which people feel welcome to engage with one another. The cockpit group did not speak of pedagogical achievements. Whereas the professionals invoked abstract responsibilities, she recalled very specific and tangible memories. In a later conversation, Sjaan expressed her grievances over the lost club in emotional terms: ‘We just cooked French fries together […] we organized the girls’ club with 25 girls. Now no one comes anymore. We had a children’s disco that was very popular and that also disappeared’ (personal communication). She emphasized how much she wanted to preserve the activities and lively interactions they had established in the neighborhood. Her remark celebrates the activities they had organized for youngsters and mourns their loss in particular. The language Sjaan used to convey her memories was informal and expressed emotions of grief and concern. This suggests that the cockpit group was not motivated by an abstract intention to educate or better people’s lives, but was emotionally engaged in organizing community activities.
Critical moment 3: Misrecognition through spatial practices
[…] then they occupied the center. They went in and just stayed altogether, 80 people, they said; (ironic intonation) “well, welfare organization, it is better that you leave because this is our club.” (personal communication)
The former cockpit group improvised the occupation that I described in opening this paper. The locks being changed had effectively shut them out, prompting them to take action. To complete the occupation, they brought mattresses, sleeping bags, and pillows. To the surprise of Gonnie, one of the cockpit’s founders, other neighbors supported the initiative: And the whole neighborhood helped us. We slept there and everyone came to bring us food and drinks. I guess they expected: ‘that small group never gets help’ but we did! (personal communication)
The number of nights they stayed in the club remains disputed. The stories told by residents, professionals, and policy practitioners suggest that it was one to four nights.
When the group took over the center, the welfare organization stopped activities, temporarily ‘closing’ the center. The board told the welfare professionals working there to move out. Doing nothing to either fight or acknowledge the occupation, those involved in the organization left the building without deliberation.
Once informed of the occupation, the local council decided to wait and do nothing. None of the policy practitioners mentioned the occupation in their narratives. To them, it was by no means a critical moment. Their analysis of the occupation is succinctly expressed in the following extract from a conversation among policy practitioners, professionals: Police officer: ‘they wanted to regain the lead, “it is their club”’ [uses sarcastic intonation]. (The other professionals nod vividly) Youth worker: ‘precisely!’ (personal communication)
The policy practitioners’ response to the occupation was to ignore it and remain absent.
Unpacking the micro-politics of misrecognition
This case study presents five tactics
2
by which people are ignored in state-citizen interactions. The micro-politics of misrecognition started when local state actors constructed a dominant narrative that ignored elements of citizens’ narratives. This (1) created ‘a ground of difference’ (Lamont et al., 2016), inscribing a boundary between the cockpit group and other citizens in the neighborhood, and (2) altered the cockpit’s meaning, transforming it from a parochial to a private space (Lofland, 1998). The idea that the cockpit was ‘a private dwelling’ became the dominant understanding of what was at stake. Dominant narratives support hegemonic power, guiding action and understandings of events (Bamberg, 2004: 360). They have the capacity to exclude opposing narratives from the public sphere. The narrative of state actors legitimized an institutional pattern (Fraser, 2000) that led to the decision to close the cockpit and start a new community center run by welfare professionals. The first tactic by which people are ignored, then, entails
Dominant narratives can establish an authoritative position, but this does not occur independently of other narratives at stake in the interactions in question. In fact, dominant and counter-narratives reinforce each other. Citizens reminisced about the activities they used to organize in the cockpit. They gave meaning to the new center by comparing the new and old situation. They associated community development with exactly those activities from which the professionals tried to disassociate the center. In the citizens’ utterances, the center’s meaning was constructed through associations of loss and grievance over the cockpit. These associations, however, were delegitimized as memories of the cockpit were actively omitted and excluded from interactions in the center. The dominant narrative, which legitimized the strategy of
The rather abstract development of narratives has concrete implications, which played into the third tactics for ignoring people:
The speech acts of active citizens were marginalized because they are idiosyncratic and emotional. The performance of emotions did not disrupt but rather unintentionally bolstered the dominant narrative that the cockpit group was private and amateurish. In the case studied here, the master narrative (Bamberg, 2004: 366) reproduced itself through the performance of emotions in interactions among citizens and professionals. By performing emotions, citizens played into the idea that their former club was private and underscored their marginality in the community center. The expression of emotions thus limited the cockpit group’s ability to position themselves differently. Instead, their emotional expressions ensured the correspondence between an individual’s disposition and the existing field of power relations (Probyn in McNay, 2008: 279). The
The third critical moment revealed how the micro-politics of misrecognition can become spatial, leading to the fifth tactic for ignoring people: absence. The moment of occupation may have been critical to citizens, but it was not for state actors. On an Arendtian understanding of citizenship, the occupation can be seen as an act of contentious politics (Isin, 2002; Tilly and Tarrow, 2006). By occupying the center, the cockpit group physically and spatially represented ‘the “stakes” of recognition and what feels “right” or “wrong” in a given situation’ (Kallio, 2017: 93). Bringing mattresses and pillows to the center so as to camp there overnight disrupted the space’s meaning and concretized the group’s ownership of it. They highlighted the involvement of other neighbors, whose support enhanced their legitimacy as participants in community development and confirmed their ‘membership in a community of meaning’ (Yar in Markell 2008: 459). The setting endowed the performance with symbolic value in that the community center, having recently been used to exclude the group, now temporarily embodied the counter-narrative. The group performed its grievances over losing the cockpit and gained a position, however fleetingly, in the new center.
When protest becomes threatening to policy practitioners and a given group’s practices of spatial appropriation are too successful, public space becomes ‘closed, sometimes gated, and policed’ (Low, 2000: 184). This is what occurred here, in the welfare organization’s decision to temporarily close the building, withdraw its professionals, and cancel all activities. A direct response to the occupation, closing the center reestablished the dominant narrative and existing power relations. By closing the center, the welfare organization acknowledged the disruptive significance of occupation, but regained authority by shutting down the building, thereby removing it from public space. By ignoring the occupation and remaining
Conclusions and theoretical reflections
I have argued that a better understanding of the micro-politics of misrecognition helps explain the growing number of disappointing citizen participation projects in which citizens are tacitly excluded from the very processes into which they are invited. Recognition does not materialize through abstract political ambitions or promising institutional frameworks, but concrete socio-spatial interactions among citizens and state actors. In these interactions, the quality and inclusivity of local democracy can be strengthened or damaged.
Drawing on 3 years of ethnography, I have identified how tactics of ‘ignoring people’ operate in participatory governance. My analysis offers an enhanced understanding of the often invisible mechanisms by which citizens are misrecognized and excluded from participatory processes. By analyzing the nitty-gritty details of interactions between among and state actors, I identified five tactics by which people were ignored. I showed how the micro-politics of misrecognition take place via the construction of storylines. Elements that were meaningful in the citizens’ storyline were
Building on critical scholarship on the politics of recognition (Ben-Arie and Fenster, 2020; Fraser, 2000; Kallio, 2017; Lamont et al., 2016; McNay, 2008; Staeheli, 2008), I have delineated five insights that helped analyze the micro-politics of misrecognition. I proposed an agent-centered, practice-oriented approach to studying interactions among citizens and state actors without losing sight of underlying power structures. Adopting an Arendtian reading of citizenship, this approach focuses on the meaning of space as a subjective and objective resource of power and agency. In analyzing the case study, I attended to narratives, speech acts, emotional expressions, and spatial practices. Here I reflect on how my findings contribute to scholarship on recognition and participatory governance.
I first analyzed how dominant narratives and counter-narratives were constructed (Bamberg, 2004), allowing me to grasp the emergence of an institutionalized pattern (Fraser, 2000) that sought to include citizens in participatory community development, yet prohibited their taking ownership over space and decision-making. The ambition for participatory community building created an interdependency between citizens and the state, holding both parties hostage to one another in a pattern of pushing and pulling that proved detrimental for the relationship and generated deep distrust. The very group on which the local state depended for community development was marginalized. This was only deepened by the local construction of difference (Lamont et al., 2016) around class and the way of life associated with the Schilderswijk. The institutional pattern of interdependence, combined with these grounds of difference, gave rise to an ambivalence around rights, which became the daily experience of ordinary people struggling for recognition (Staeheli, 2008). Yet that same interdependence also generated a ‘margin of freedom’ (McNay, 2008) in which citizens celebrated their political agency. The narrative analysis also helped me grasp how that space of agency related to structures of power. Agency emerges when citizens insist on introducing their counter-narratives into the public sphere (Arendt, 1958).
The second way in which I revealed the micro-politics of misrecognition has been by analyzing speech acts and emotional expressions. An important finding is that the articulation of emotions and informal utterances that claim ownership and seek inclusion have the opposite effect in the context of power structures formulated through dominant and counter-narratives. These expressions reinforced rather than disrupted the master narrative, thereby legitimizing the further exclusion of citizens from making claims in the political realm.
Finally, the results contribute to geographical scholarship that introduced contextuality to the study of recognition (Ben-Arie and Fenster, 2020; Häkli and Kallio, 2014; Kallio, 2017). My findings reveal the ambiguous meaning of space amid protest and processes of participatory governance. At one level, citizens involved in my case study used space to create a margin of freedom: by physically occupying it they symbolically enacted an imagined future. At another, though, the fact that the state ignored the occupation and remained absent meant that the very same space concretized the citizens’ perceived worthlessness. These spatial acts encapsulated a deep misrecognition of the citizens’ agency. Actively ‘doing nothing’ was a spatial political performance by which the resistance and position of the governed were misrecognized and excluded from the public sphere. By ignoring people, local authorities conditioned citizens’ agency and controlled everyday politics in the polis (Häkli and Kallio, 2014: 189). The socio-spatial practice of absence made their misrecognition even more concrete, visible, and painful.
Scholarship that seeks to better understand exclusionary mechanisms in participatory processes should thus be aware that the tactics of ignoring people constitute a socio-spatial practice of politics. My agent-centered and practice-oriented approach to the politics of recognition shows what is happening below the surface of institutional frameworks and inclusive promises based on abstract political agendas. My analysis thereby echoes the work of scholars who call for a shift of emphasis from policy plans and ambitions to practice (Wagenaar, 2014). Scholars interested in participatory governance should take the micro-politics of citizen-state interactions into account, for they indicate exactly how participatory processes morph into experiences of misrecognition. That said, being aware of the invisible and tacit mechanisms of ignoring people might allow policy practitioners to take interactions among citizens and state actors as opportunities for recognizing people’s worth and political agency.