Co-Optation Considered: A Research Agenda

This paper presents two related but distinct projects. First, it presents an empirical research project on staff of migrant service organisations in the UK, the Netherlands and Austria, who identify as having the same migration and/or ethnic background to their ‘clients’. It explores the parallels between their position in these white hegemonic organisations and the historical role of cultural brokers, mediators and go-betweens in colonial and settler societies. In particular it explores their contentious role as ‘traitors/translators’, raising questions about co-optation. Subsequently, I will present a conceptual project to develop a more substantive research agenda around co-optation and show what can be gained from placing co-optation at the center of analysis. On the one hand this is done by synthesizing the scattered literature on co-optation in various feminist subfields, on the other hand by presenting a selection of studies on co-optation published which offer concepts and empirical insights that are instructive for developing a feminist research agenda on co-optation. This forms the basis for a set of guiding questions that can be used for analyzing any particular case of possible co-optation or for case comparison and to support a more structured approach to mapping the relevant actors, the conditions under which co-optation takes place, its effects and the subsequent responses. Moreover, the research agenda should invite discussion on a conceptual toolkit, which will aid in answering the analytical guiding questions. This means both developing new concepts and refining existing ones, such as amenability; blunting; channeling; acceptance; illusion of inclusion.