ABSTRACT
This chapter delineates how the book's source material is read in a sociological-historical manner and launches a methodological intervention of stock stories. First, the understanding of history is determined as a break with modernity's progressive linear history replacing it with anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler's concept of recursive histories that reveal new surfaces in the present. Sociologist Avery Gordon's concepts of ghosts and hauntings supplement the idea of recursive histories to understand the durability of coloniality and racism. Second, the initial reading of the source material focuses on welfare workers’ role in sociation processes conditioned by social relations of super- and subordination, and sustained by investments and justifications. Third, it is explained how the methodological intervention of stock stories, in the vein of Critical Race Theory's unapologetic use of creativity, is carried out as a way of re-describing events told by majority groups such as welfare workers. This is prepared by means of fictionalisation, i.e., composing stock stories based on fragments of textual events and storytelling qualities, such as subjectivations, problem descriptions, interventions and meaning making. In this way, stock stories, which speaks of the unspoken, and name the unnamed super- and subordinations of racial structuring, are generated.
