Investigating Multiculturalism and Mono-Culturalism Through the Infrastructure of Integration in Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Abstract

This paper explores first-hand experiences of citizenship education specifically-designed for immigrants from the perspective of native Dutch settlement workers and volunteers in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Based on eight months of ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with settlement workers, this article explores how these ‘minor figures’ influence and inform the ‘Infrastructure of Integration’ and reinterpret national Dutch cultural values and norms on a local level. Using past understandings of multiculturalism and the current project of assimilating all non-western Muslim immigrants into Dutch society, this article investigates how these minor figures reproduce exclusionary discourses of belonging to the imagined community of the Netherlands.