Professional 
interventions 
as 
a 
state­ crafting 
grammar 
addressing 
“the
 immigrant”


Professional interventions have gained significant currency in today’s state practices. Professional interventions, which materialised in the post-WWII emergence of the universal welfare state, are pointed out as central means for forming the neoliberal states’ citizens in today’s era of globalisation and migration (Pedersen, 2011), but we still do not know how specific pedagogical interventions addressing “the immigrant” function as state crafting endeavours. The objective of this project is both empirical and theoretical. First, the project seeks empirically to describe and understand how the transformation in professional interventions is related to historical processes of state transformation. The focus is on the changed character of professional pedagogical work in Denmark: from the universalistic welfare state’s interventions of civilisation as regards all to the neoliberal state’s disciplinary and moralising interventions explicitly targeting groups of deviating individuals, especially “the immigrant”. Second, the project will develop original theoretical knowledge contributing to the research area of the sociology of professions, linking to conceptualisations from research areas of sociology of pedagogy, political sociology and immigration studies due to the historical processes of state transformation just mentioned.