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Introduction: This research is about the power of documents as recorders of history and preservers of institutional memory. Specifically, the study examines Project 1012, a municipal reform project in Amsterdam’s famous Red-Light District. Methods: We performed a critical discourse analysis on 10 policy briefs leading up to and following the implementation of Project 1012 between 2007 and 2020. Results: Our study reveals that the documents actively evoke certain narratives about sex work, its historical connections to the city, and its social problems to support the reduction of the industry. The documents omit other information about the history and origins of the problems experienced in Amsterdam’s Red-Light District, including policymakers’ own roles in the creation of these issues. Conclusions: The research concludes that policy documents have deontic powers and can be considered “folded objects” that consistently present certain narratives as truthful by omitting or downplaying the historical context of social issues. By folding these narratives in themselves, they have the power to shape the futures of the city and its citizens, executing a myriad of changes that have significantly impacted the lives and work conditions of local sex workers. Policy Implications: This research highlights the importance of being aware of the power and potential biases inherent in policy documents. Policymakers should strive to create policies that are based on accurate and comprehensive information and consider the voices of marginalized groups, such as sex workers, who are disproportionately affected by the policies.

Building on previous work about cultural informalisation and the growing urban–rural divide in western democracies, this article studies symbolic boundary work as performed by white youths living in rural areas in the Netherlands. We conducted a micro-sociological analysis of how these youths celebrate regional festivals in the Netherlands, and particularly the meanings they attach to their affective displays of intoxication and sexuality. We show how distinction is ‘done’ here by many of these youths taking pride in drinking too much beer, sexual directness and impropriety, which they argue are expressions of conviviality and down-to-earthness. In doing so, they appear to be finding dignity and redemption in an image of themselves as savages and reappropriating it as part of their own ‘civility’, contrasting their revelry with what they perceive to be urban, middle-class snobbery.

The challenge in this study is to ‘do justice’ to ethnic diversity in research on young people and sexuality in the Netherlands. I argue that current research practices are unintentionally implicated in constructing and maintaining ethnic boundaries, tending to (re)produce very limited views of ethnicity and culture as fixed identities that steer youths towards adopting adverse and risky sexual behaviours. I argue that this tradition fails to ‘see’ the quintessentially social, multifaceted and contextual natures of ethnicity, sexuality and culture, which are best understood as being ‘always in the making’ within young people's lived and embodied sexual experiences. Consequently, I went beyond conventional sociological approaches that are crucial in reproducing current biases and severely limit the researcher's access to these experiences. The methodological solution I explored is a peer-to-peer ethnography of sexuality at parties. I discuss the merits, challenges and limitations of this approach, along with the practical and ethical choices made when conducting the fieldwork. I then review some of the main results and the value of this methodology for addressing key issues in contemporary cultural sociology.

The rise of populist anti-immigration parties in Western Europe has received wide attention in the scholarly literature (for example, Fennema 2005, Ignazi 1992, 2003, Kitschelt 1997, Minkenberg 1992, Van der Brug 2003). Time and again, researchers have concluded that support for such parties is mostly found among the lower educated (for example, Achterberg 2006a, 2006b, Houtman et al. 2008a, Kitschelt 1995, Minkenberg 1992). They are the ones who form ‘an electoral potential…, which feels attracted to an anti-immigrant message’ (Van der Brug 2003: 103). Of course, this is hardly surprising given the consistent finding that the lower educated are more ethnically intolerant than the higher educated (Adorno et al. 1950, Dekker and Ester 1987, Grabb 1979, 1980, Lipset 1981, Lipsitz 1965).