Denied, but effective – stock stories in Danish welfare work with refugees

ABSTRACT

This article explores the Nordic denial of colonial involvement and complicity and the way it operates in welfare work with refugees in Denmark. Deploying a postcolonial welfare analytics that puts welfare work in a context of colonially social, economic, and cultural relations, the article develops a methodology of composing narratives, based on readings of four professional journals published by the labour unions of schoolteachers, social educators, nurses, and social workers. Ultimately, the article excavates three stock stories in welfare work, that is, the stock stories of compassion, potentializing, and colour-blindness. The stock stories are shown to hide race and racism in the shapes of social inequality, market exploitability, and dehumanization of the refugee, and the article thus exhibits how universalistic welfare work denies the existence of race and racism, and acts complicitly in reproducing the status quo of the modern welfare state’s racialized practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial relationality
• colonial complicity
• racialized welfare
• CRT
• Denmark
• majoritarian standard story

Acknowledgments

The authors have contributed equally to the article and the joint research project underpinning it, and they are listed in alphabetical order. The article is a proliferation of the collective research project Professional Interventions as a Statecrafting Grammar vis-à-vis the Immigrant (grant reference 0602-02544B) that was funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (2013–2016). We thank the student research assistants Martine Lind, then student at Roskilde University, and Katrine Severinsen, then student at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, for their most vigilant and inventive way of identifying the documentary material in collaboration with us in the period October through December 2016. For their most sage advice, we also want to thank the reviewers of our CRSEA conference paper 2019, which was a sketch for this article. We also thank Tess Lea for her attentive reading and commenting on this article.

Disclosure statement

No financial interest or benefit has arisen from the direct application of this research. Thus, there is no potential conflict of interest to report.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Det Frie Forskningsråd [0602-02544B].