ABSTRACT
The stock story of potentialising is governed by social-liberal fantasies about self-sufficiency, productivity and infused with protestant work ethics. This chapter exhibits how welfare workers are charged with the ability to determine and direct the refugee's potential in order to meet the interests of capitalistic welfare society. Accordingly, the stock story is animated by three variations in terms of stimulating, pioneering and identifying. The first variation shows how welfare workers converge the interests of the refugee's expected need for self-sufficiency and the labour market's need for manpower. The second variation describes welfare workers as a superior avantgarde experimenting with refugees as disposable human material to find innovative ways of catering for the refugees’ health, education and labour market integration. Yet, in the third variation, selected few refugees are included in the ranks of welfare workers when identified as kindred professionals and casted as uncle Toms. The chapter ends by coining the work of potentialising as a matter of keeping things open, which retains refugees in proximity to a moving target and promise of prosperity in the capitalistic welfare society. This involves welfare workers’ continuous investments in a racial ontology of humanity that never acknowledges the refugee as fully human.
