Marta Padovan-Özdemir

Professional encounters with the post-WWII immigrant: a privileged prism for studying the shaping of European welfare nation-states

Abstract This introductory article argues that practices of professional thinking and acting on the presence of the immigrant offer a privileged analytical prism through which to study how post-WWII European welfare nation-states have been shaped and crafted. As such, study of the formation of post-WWII welfare nation-states where one usually does not look for them is suggested: that is, beyond the bureaucratic logic imposed by the state itself. Consequently, a wedge is driven into the mundane professional practices embedded in the immigrant/welfare nation-state nexus, through which may be observed the very heterogeneous production of problems and solutions with immense effect on human lives, communities, and societies. These practices demonstrate the boundary work of the welfare nation-state that shapes it and gives shape to the construction and reconstruction of immigrant children and their families as problems and, thus, objects of integration and professional intervention. In this sense, the prism offers a new approach to writing histories of immigrant children’s education and the shaping and crafting of welfare nation-states that displaces both objects of study to professional practices of their making. In the first part of the article, the privileging of this analytical prism is substantiated historically and theoretically. In the second part, the four contributions constituting this themed issue are introduced. Finally there is a discussion of how the four contributions demonstrate the analytical prism’s cross-national relevance and historical sensitivity, adding new histories of how immigrant children’s education has been caught up in the immigrant/welfare nation-state nexus.

Making precarious immigrant families and weaving the Danish welfare nation-state fabric 1970–2010

Abstract This article explores the making of immigrant families as precarious elements in the governing of the population’s welfare within the Danish welfare nation-state since the 1970s. The emphasis is on how immigrant families became a problem of welfare governing, and what knowledge practices and welfare techniques emerged as problem-solving responses. The article analyses a diverse set of national and local administrative documents advancing a polyhedron of intelligibility by which the authors discover how problem-solving complexes responsive to immigrant families change and sediment, and ultimately, weave the fabric of a Danish welfare nation-state faced with non-Western immigration after the economic boom in the late 1960s.

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”.