Anouk de Koning is associate professor at the department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, where she co-directs the interfaculty research programme Social Citizenship and Migration. She currently leads two major research projects (2022-2027), Prototyping Welfare in Europe: Experiments in State and Society (financed with a Vici Grant) and Social Work and the Art of Crafting Resilient Societies (financed with a NWA Grant). These projects explore the new socio-political worlds brought into being in welfare experiments in Europe.

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Anouk de Koning is associate professor at the department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, where she co-directs the interfaculty research programme Social Citizenship and Migration. She currently leads two major research projects (2022-2027), Prototyping Welfare in Europe: Experiments in State and Society (financed with a Vici Grant) and Social Work and the Art of Crafting Resilient Societies (financed with a NWA Grant). These projects explore what governmental and community relations are being crafted in welfare experiments in Europe, and what political horizons they prefigure.

Prototyping Welfare in Europe

Through a comparative ethnography on the sociopolitical arrangements being prototyped in welfare experiments in Amsterdam, Marseille, Thessaloniki and Manchester, the Prototyping Welfare project, seeks to understand the historically sedimented, located nature of Europe’s sociopolitical worlds and futures. Drawing on these comparative insights, the project also seeks to further anthropological theories of the welfare state.

Social Work and the Art of Crafting Resilient Societies

The Crafting Resilience project examines the dilemmas and pitfalls of new collaborations between state actors and citizens in eight cities in the Netherlands, and will suggest ways for them to become more effective, democratic and just. The project brings together a consortium consisting of a multidisciplinary team of junior and senior researchers, and a wide range of policy actors and practitioners involved in crafting social resilience. Anouk directs this project, together with Femke Kaulingfreks (InHolland) and Maartje van der Woude (VVI, Leiden University).

Sociopolitical regimes and lived inequalities

Trained in both cultural anthropology and social history, Anouk has conducted research on the relation between lived inequalities and sociopolitical regimes in urban contexts in Egypt, Suriname and the Netherlands. Her PhD research examined how neoliberal reforms shaped emerging forms of inequality and segregation in middle-class Cairo and among its young professionals, with a focus on how gender and class shape urban inequalities in the Middle East.

After a postdoctoral position that explored social histories of inequality in Suriname (2005-2009), Anouk received an NWO Conflict and Security grant to study how heated racialized debates about the nation and its migrant others made their way into urban everyday lives in the Netherlands. This research alerted her to the ubiquity of welfare actors and the important role of welfare institutions in shaping collective lives in Western Europe.

The “Reproducing Europe” project (2015-2020, financed with a Starting Grant) allowed her to explore the key role of welfare state institutions in redefining everyday citizenship in Europe at the intersection of new welfare models and anxieties about an increasingly diverse body politic. Reproducing Europe examined welfare encounters between migrant parents and professionals in Amsterdam, Milan and Paris. Rather than top-down citizenship agendas, it found a deep investment in social citizenship - the obligations of the state to care for its citizens - on the part of parents and professionals.