ABSTRACT Through everyday practices, excluded and marginalised undocumented migrants struggle for citizenship, question bordering practices, and can achieve forms of inclusion incrementally. Based on an ethnographic case study in Amsterdam, this article evidences and theorises these piecemeal struggles of undocumented migrants. We show how undocumented migrants—discursively and spatially—claim ‘the right to have rights’. We demonstrate how forms of inclusion emerge as the result of ‘claim-making’: by making appeals to human rights, the use of (limited) legal rights, and identity claims. We combine the analysis of claim-making with research into an understudied but highly relevant process of ‘claim-placing’, which refers to how the use (public) spaces and places can add weight to discursive claim-making. We demonstrate that an incremental process of ‘claim-making’ and ‘claim-placing’ leads to a slightly increased recognition as political subjects and forms of inclusion.

ABSTRACT Recent decades have witnessed mounting attention to the theme of recognition, both in public policy and in the academic world. Scholarly debate on recognition is dominated by philosophers, while the policy debate is dominated by political and educational perspectives. A sociological perspective has scarcely been developed. In this article, we approach recognition as a sociological phenomenon with the aid of Collins’ theory of Interaction Ritual Chains. Our research is located in three Dutch sheltered workshops that aim to provide recognition through work to young men with mild intellectual disabilities. While Collins provides an interesting interactional perspective to distinguish between different situations of recognition, we add an institutional dimension by showing how individualising labour-market policies and care practices articulate a set of ‘interaction rules’ that encourage some recognition rituals and foreclose others. This demonstrates the importance of a sociological contribution to the debate on recognition, and points to ‘unintended consequences’ of policies that aim to strengthen recognition in ways that in fact cannot be achieved by those involved. Such a sociological perspective can bring out more practical and nuanced accounts of recognition, and enrich both scholarly and policy debates on this topic.