dr. A.S. Vollebergh (Anick)

My research focuses on the lived experience and practical governance of urban marginality and diversity in a postcolonial Europe marked by racialized and secularist anxieties and desires. I do so by ethnographically tracing how key notions haunting current European discussions, are negotiated, given shape, and reimagined by urban denizens, activist organizations, and institutional actors in various national contexts. I am co-applicant of the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA) project 'Crafting Resilience', which investigates what new state-citizen relations are developed under the aegis of 'social resilience' in policy, social work and grassroots projects. ‘Crafting Resilience’ examines the dilemmas and challenges of such attempts to bridge the gap between state and institutions and marginalized citizens together with a range of consortium partners and social practitioners, attending in particular to questions of power, ethno-racial difference and unspoken norms.
In parallel to the NWA-project, I am currently developing a new research line on the so-called crisis of 'authority' , and the way in which doing authority in the Netherlands is rearticulated between authoritarian populism and therapeutic personal-development models of 'non-violence'.

Research interests: ethics and personhood, authority and freedom, conviviality and urban life, phenomenology of race, piety and liberal-secularism, the state and new public governance, populism and vitalism.