Anouk de Koning is professor of Power, Politics and the State in the department of Anthropology. Her research agenda focuses on the sociopolitical realities and futures produced in everyday welfare practices, both in and beyond the state. She currently leads two major research projects (2022-2027), Prototyping Welfare in Europe: Experiments in State and Society (financed with a Vici Grant) and Social Work and the Art of Crafting Resilient Societies (financed with a NWA Grant). These projects explore the new sociopolitical worlds brought into being in welfare experiments across Europe.

Trained in both cultural anthropology and social history, Anouk has conducted research on the relation between lived inequalities and sociopolitical regimes in urban contexts in Egypt, Suriname and the Netherlands. Her PhD research examined how neoliberal reforms shaped emerging forms of inequality and segregation in middle-class Cairo and among its young professionals, with a focus on how gender and class shape urban inequalities in the Middle East.

After a postdoctoral position that explored social histories of inequality in Suriname (2005-2009), Anouk studied how heated racialized debates about the nation and its migrant others made their way into urban everyday lives in the Netherlands. This research alerted her to the ubiquity of welfare actors and the important role of welfare institutions in shaping collective lives in Western Europe.

The “Reproducing Europe” project (2015-2020, financed with a ERC Starting Grant) allowed her to explore the key role of welfare state institutions in redefining everyday citizenship in Europe at the intersection of new welfare models and anxieties about an increasingly diverse body politic. Reproducing Europe examined welfare encounters between migrant parents and professionals in Amsterdam, Milan and Paris. Rather than top-down citizenship agendas, it found a deep investment in social citizenship - the obligations of the state to care for its citizens - on the part of parents and professionals.

Anouk is currently finalizing a book on the Dutch welfare state that draws on her fieldwork with Amsterdam's Parent and Child Teams.

Anouk currently leads two major projects that examine the making of welfare futures in critical times. The Prototyping Welfare project (prototypingwelfare.nl) examines how welfare futures are re-imagined “as things fall apart”. The team studies the innovation that happens as welfare arrangements increasingly fall short of spiraling needs. It asks how welfare landscapes are reshaped, in practice, in light of shortages and human emergencies, from precarious incomes, lack of housing and public services to food insecurity. The researchers do so in cities across Europe: Amsterdam, London, Thessaloniki and Marseille. The project seeks to understand the historically sedimented, located nature of Europe’s sociopolitical worlds and futures. Drawing on these comparative insights, we hope to further anthropological theories of the welfare state.

The other project, Crafting Resilience (craftingresilience.nl), addresses similar questions in the Dutch context as part of a large consortium that consists of researchers and “practitioners”: policy makers, social workers and security professionals. Anouk directs this project, together with Femke Kaulingfreks (InHolland and UvA) and Maartje van der Woude (VVI, Leiden University).

Anouk’s research line examines new social policies that seek to do policy with beneficiaries and the neighborhood. The team asks how practitioners struggle to make good on the promises that the new policy seems to hold with limited resources in unruly urban landscapes marked by deep classed and raced inequalities. What new political relations and welfare futures do they produce as they do so?