Mandy de Wilde

For my doctorate I researched the prominence and promise of the communitarian citizen in Dutch local governance in general, and in a disadvantaged urban neighbourhood in particular. Over the past two decades, communitarian criticisms of the lack of public engagement and a sense of local belonging have inspired extensive debates across Western Europe on how best to govern deprived urban neighbourhoods. One governmental strategy has been to engineer neighbourhood communities as localised, collective spheres of belonging. I showed how ‘governing through affect’ has been part of Dutch neighbourhood policy since the turn of the millennium.

Through an in-depth study of a community participation programme in a deprived Amsterdam neighbourhood, I analysed how policy practitioners use ‘sensitising policy techniques’ to enhance social cohesion and encourage communitarian citizenship among neighbourhood residents. Although governments often speak of ‘communities’ as self-evident entities, I argued that communities are better understood as enactments where discourses of neighbourliness, proximity, intimacy and familiarity encourage a localised, collective sense of belonging.  Ultimately, this influences who feels heard, acknowledged and included and who does not, and, as such, has an effect on the empowerment of some, the feelings of exclusion of others and the sense of belonging of all citizens who are subject to this type of local governance.

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I received my PhD-education at the Sociology Department of the University of Amsterdam. My doctoral supervisors were Jan Willem Duyvendak and Evelien Tonkens.