Experts by experience and key persons
The Dutch welfare state through the lens of new figures
This project focuses on the changing relations between the Dutch state, professionals and citizens in the field of social welfare services. The promise of an ‘intimate’ state places new figures centre stage, such as the 'expert by experience' and the 'key person'. By following these figures closely, this research project asks what forms of authority, expertise and hierarchy are imagined through these figures and how they are enacted by people who embody these roles.
New Figures
New figures like the expert by experience and the key person populate the current welfare landscape in the Netherlands. They exist at the interface of what is imagined and then made real, turning abstract policy goals into realities. These figures have distinct histories, preceding their configuration in policy texts. Subsequently, people take on these roles in practice; they become instrumental characters in the welfare landscape. What is the background against which these figures emerge? And what is their role in constituting a new welfare state?
This project starts from the idea that these figures embody certain narratives, thus shedding light on the reconfiguration of relationalities and hierarchies in the Dutch welfare state. They are tasked with performing scripts, in which particular ways of acting and speaking are prescribed. How do new welfare figures negotiate these scripts, adhering to and diverging from them as they go?
Relationalities and New Welfare Figures
New figures offer a unique window into new welfare regimes' narratives, tensions and dilemmas. Promises of proximity, intimacy, and resilience, ubiquitous in contemporary welfare programs, are enacted by people taking on these roles. Who is included in these promises of proximity? How do people embodying these roles take up, reproduce or challenge intersectional social inequalities? And how are expertise and authority claimed and contested? Through ethnographic fieldwork, this research seeks to illuminate the logic of the new welfare state and the relationalities and realities that are established.