Enacting Voice Amongst Young Immigrants in a Precarious Legal Situation: Everyday Practices of Intermediation in a State-Funded Civic Youth Project

Abstract

In response to the current processes of migration, the civic engagement of ‘status non-citizens’ (Bosniak, The Oxford handbook of citizenship. Oxford University Press, 2017) is attracting increasing scholarly interest. Alongside the dominant focus on the subversive potential of political practices by non-citizens, additional systematic attention should be directed towards institutionalized processes of political socialization amongst immigrants, as aspiring citizens within receiving nations. To generate in-depth insight into the intermediating practices of civil society organizations (CSOs) relating to migration and integration, we conducted a 2.5-year ethnographic study of a project performed by a state-funded CSO specifically aimed at ‘giving a voice’ to young immigrants in Flanders, Belgium. We apply the ‘civic action’ framework (Lichterman & Eliasoph, American Journal of Sociology, 120(3):798–863, 2014) to examine the most prevalent styles of civic engagement and how they are negotiated in everyday practices by young immigrants, volunteers and paid professionals. The results reveal a complex environment in which different civic styles occur simultaneously and produce tensions. We identify a process of political socialization through participation in the project that both incites and constrains the voices of young immigrants. We propose regarding the ‘work of intermediation’ as a constantly failing operation requiring incessant remaking, and we suggest ‘multiple intermediation’ as a contingent process of navigation between conflicting tendencies.