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This article explores how notions of citizenship are negotiated in encounters between parents and youth care professionals in Amsterdam in the context of heated debates over citizenship and belonging. We draw on ethnographic research on Egyptian migrant parents' interactions with the welfare state, and on the work of youth care professionals. We found that both parents and professionals were invested in universal forms of citizenship. Parents wanted to be treated like their fellow citizens regardless of their background, while professionals wanted to care for all children. While parents feared and suspected that their children were subject to unfair treatment, professional practices left little space for disagreement or a consideration of racialized aspects of their encounters with clients. We conclude that notions of equal citizenship provide a primary, but uncertain ground for the elaboration of citizenship and belonging in parenting encounters, which is haunted by the spectre of difference and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades the Netherlands has seen the rise of anxieties regarding the present and future of the nation. De Koning explores the way such anxieties circulate and are taken up in various settings and by differently positioned people, using the ‘notorious’ Amsterdam Diamantbuurt neighbourhood as her vantage point. She focuses on engagements with the iconic figure of the troublesome ‘Moroccan youth’ in order to trace how such anxious discourses move from the national stage, to the neighbourhood and into the narratives of Moroccan-Dutch residents. While younger women contest discourses that frame their male peers as inherently disposed to crime, and instead single out overzealous policing, older residents grapple with explanations. They articulate an anxious belonging that differs markedly from the contentious narratives of the younger generation. These engagements give us a sense of how such publicly articulated anxieties interpellate differently positioned people, and feed into generationally specific senses of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I explore the seemingly contradictory notion of citizenship agendas for the abject. While abjection suggests a casting off or expulsion, citizenship implies inclusion. The youth and security policies that I argue can be read as citizenship agendas for the abject evidence this contradiction and the concomitant ambiguity. This article focuses on the workings of the ‘youth and security assemblage’ in the Amsterdam South District. This policy assemblage primarily targets ‘unruly’ young Moroccan-Dutch men from Amsterdam's notorious Diamantbuurt. In Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Netherlands, such young men have been portrayed as the ultimate troublemakers who have made urban lives unsafe and ‘terrorized’ entire neighborhoods. Through an ethnographic analysis of a public event that brought together various members of the youth and security assemblage, this article examines the tensions and organized distrust that these citizenship agendas for the abject carry within them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]