Mobilizing lived experience in the fight against racism: the case of the Amsterdam municipality

In this article, we explore how the City of Amsterdam developed a strategy to fight exclusion within its own organization by collecting articulations of experiences of discrimination. Drawing on policy-related documentation (2019–2024) and interviews with policymakers and advisors (2024–2025), we explore how these experiences became communicable knowledge within the organization. We identified four central discursive formats that made experiences of racism and exclusion accessible to other employees and the organization. In exploring how municipal systems defined and sought to respond to knowledge claims of employees in socially disadvantaged positions, we observed that the discursive formats used to mobilize these experiences could themselves pose obstacles. Mobilizing lived experiences as communicable knowledge requires a transformation that adheres to epistemic norms and logics of inquiry, which may sit uneasily with the embodied, subjective and affective character of lived experiences.