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- Convenors:
-
Amanda Gilbertson
(University of Melbourne)
David Giles (Deakin University)
Eve Vincent (Macquarie University)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
Liberalism is in crisis. What is the nature of this crisis and what role can anthropologists play in naming it? We seek clues in expressions of "regulating the poor" emerging in this (post)liberal landscape, whereby states extend surveillance and support, discipline and dole, to vulnerable subjects.
Long Abstract:
Liberalism is in crisis. On many fronts, scholars and critics have warned of the ways in which liberal (and neoliberal) political and economic norms have been disrupted or eroded globally, often under their own contradictions. We believe anthropologists are well-situated to comment. In this roundtable we ask — what is the nature of this crisis, and what role can anthropologists play in naming it?
In particular, we seek clues in those twenty-first century expressions of "regulating the poor" (à la Piven and Cloward) that emerge in this (post)liberal landscape, whereby states extend surveillance and support, discipline and dole, to vulnerable subjects. On one hand, the neoliberal rollback of welfare states is challenged by the pre-pandemic expansion, in the Global South, of social programs targeting the poor, and the imperative, in the Global North, to fund social support during the pandemic. On the other, increasingly authoritarian states condition access to welfare support on submission to further state surveillance and control. As a result of neoliberalism's outsourcing of welfare to civil society, post-liberal authoritarian impulses are transmitted through a devolved constellation of quasi-state powers, while state-sanctioned forms of vigilante violence against, and surveillance of, the poor expand.
As non-state actors play key roles in regulating the poor, and frictions between liberal, illiberal, and post-liberal organs of the state grow increasingly evident, the state's coherence and role in reproducing or resisting social, political, and economic order is in question. What new forms of liberal, illiberal, or post-liberal order might emerge from these disjunctures?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 November, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Anthropologists are well suited to document the consequences of neoliberalism on vulnerable-made populations. However, research results are usually neglected. How can we be successful in installing processes that effectively incorporate our knowledge production into decision-making processes?
Paper long abstract:
Neoliberalism is a political, economic, and social system that claims that the market should be out of the government’s control as well as an ideology that affects subjectivities (Brown 2015). Neoliberal ideology has permeated every sphere of society, including the migration management apparatus—through tropes of self-sufficiency, personal responsibility, and privatization (Riva and Routon 2020), as well as through dominant representations of normative resettlement, and rhetorical dimensions of agency and self-representation (Dykstra-DeVette 2018). Currently, the COVID-19 pandemic has given states the perfect alibi to enable the closure the borders and thus ‘a way out’ to disavow their international responsibilities.
In this scenario, anthropologists are indeed well suited to document and examine the consequences of privatisation on vulnerable-made populations and funds are allocated to conduct such research. According to Barak Kalir and Céline Cantat (2020), between 2014-2020 the EU designated more than 3 billion Euros to finance research on asylum and migration, and yet, the results of this evidence-based research has been neglected by those same states that have chosen to fund such studies. What I propose for our roundtable is to include a conversation about the gap that exists between: the potential of anthropology to make a difference regarding the people who are most affected by neoliberal measures, and the mechanisms that make a difference—including activism and resistance movements. In other words, how can we be successful in installing processes that effectively incorporate our knowledge production into decision-making processes?
Paper short abstract:
NGOization is argued as a key process to the expansion of neoliberalized development and feminist movements. This paper offers to view NGOization as a productive form of power which in its engagement may bring new class formation and reworking the state’s form of governance.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary discussion on social justice activism and development initiative in the nongovernmental organization (NGO) form centers on the analysis of NGOization. Understood as the professionalization of activism and depoliticization, NGOization is argued as a key process to the expansion of neoliberalized development and feminist movements. Despite the liberal-pluralist view that NGOs are a grassroots alternative to the state, the organized form of social movements, closer to the people, and tend to be democratic, anthropologists have challenged neoliberal assumptions behind NGOization, revealing its impact on the changing relations of NGOs to the simultaneously changing nature of the state and some form of politics. This raises a question of how NGOization brings tension and contests the terrain of engagement between the state, foreign powers, and the society. Anthropologists have asserted that NGOization is systematically undermining the state’s regulatory power, rendering development discourse on neoliberal logic and legitimizing the state downsized. Drawing from an ethnographic study of an NGO’s work and local politics in West Timor, Indonesia, I argue that NGOization is enabling neoliberal governmentality which bequeathed to the increased state’s surveillance and power over the population. I offer to view NGOization as a productive form of power which in its engagement the NGOization may bring new class formation and reworking the state’s form of governance. Equipped by this framework, this article thus provides a potential anthropological contribution to the study of governmentality and activism.
Paper short abstract:
Regimes to dismantle unauthorised homeless encampments in North American cities constitute webs of exclusion from urban citizenship. Their advocates assert an illiberal right to the city and construct the homeless as an “internal enemy”, echoing other contemporary illiberal movements.
Paper long abstract:
Like cities across the American west coast, in recent years Seattle saw its housing crisis—already steadily metastasizing over decades—cross stratospheric new thresholds. Most conspicuously, unauthorised homeless encampments grew to a scale not seen in generations. In response, cities like Seattle have developed multi-million dollar regimes of urban enclosure, popularly called “sweeps,” to dismantle these encampments. This paper argues that, through juridical loopholes, extralegal Memoranda of Understanding, digital collusion with housed residents (via apps and social media), and outright dispossession by the police, these regimes construct webs of exception and exclusion from urban space and citizenship that force the unhoused into either quasi-carceral shelters or permanent mobility. Further, the resulting tensions have pitted campers and their advocates against NIMBY coalitions whose rhetoric often accuses the homeless of taking their city. Rhetoric in social and broadcast media campaigns, like “Seattle Looks Like Shit” and “Seattle is Dying”, asserts an illiberal right to the city on the part of homeowners, businesses, and conservative elites alike—one which constructs the homeless and their allies as an existential threat that Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt might have recognised as an “internal enemy,” comparable in tenor and content to other scapegoated communities singled out as political threats by analogous populist and illiberal discourses. This paper therefore argues that current antihomeless measures and coalitions echo in key ways both the contemporary rise of illiberal political movements in other arenas, and the current globalized, often urbanized crises of liberalism and capitalism that give rise to those movements.
Paper short abstract:
This paper describes the the implementation in Lucknow, India, of an education policy by a network of state, civil society, and private sector actors. This 'hybrid state' expands the reach of the state and regulates the poor by embedding them within an ethos of consumer citizenship.
Paper long abstract:
India's Right to Education Act (2009) contains a provision - Section 12(1)(c) - that requires all private schools to educate underprivileged children for free. This policy aims to create a more diverse student body in private schools, each of which typically caters to families within a very narrow socio-economic range due to differential school fees and selection processes. Section 12(1)(c) is in effect a public-private partnership with the state reimbursing private schools for each 'Right to Education' or 'RTE' child enrolled. Drawing on several months of ethnographic fieldwork in the North Indian city of Lucknow, this paper describes the complex network of state agents, development professionals, private school personnel and parent activists involved in the implementation of this policy. I demonstrate that this seemingly radical policy has not destabilised the notion that education is a commodity and people have a right only to the education they can afford. Consistent with other scholarship on India's turn to rights-bases legislation, Section 12(1)(c) appears to facilitate rather than counteract the neoliberalisation of the state, regulating the poor by embedding them within an ethos of consumer citizenship rather than challenging the unequal structures of India's heavily privatised education system. This is a reconfiguration rather than shrinking of state power as boundaries between state, civil society and private sector become blurred and tensions arise between the privatisation of a public good (education) and state capture of private goods (private schools).
Paper short abstract:
Conditional welfare regimes command activity, which is compelled by illiberal instruments. This activity is in turn digitally surveyed; failure to render it visible via reporting apps results in financial penalties. What counts as legitimate activity, and what does this tell us about the present?
Paper long abstract:
The receipt of social security in Australia has become more conditional over recent decades as well as more punitive, in concert with a broader global transition. Indeed, Australia embarked on the privatisation of social security delivery earlier and more systematically than comparative polities. I have been interviewing women impacted by a specific welfare measure emblematic of these broader trends towards conditionality, financial sanctions and privatisation — a preemployment program called ParentsNext. This welfare reform measure exemplifies the widening net of conditionality, as single mothers with young babies, who are in receipt of Parenting Payment, are subject to compulsory participation. Participants are compelled to sign a ‘Participation Plan’, an illiberal instrument that commands participants to undertake often-absurd approved activities. Inquiring closely into what counts as legitimate activity, I argue that this program provides a window onto the post-Fordist welfare state and the contemporary sexual contract. Whereas the Fordist welfare state rested on the figure of the white male ‘breadwinner’ and his dependents, the post-Fordist sexual contract deems parenting as non-productive and regards all forms of dependency as pathological. Caring is delegitimised as inactivity, while parents are recast as ‘unemployed’, and exposed to forms of chaotic and arbitrary governance of their circumstances. This in turn prepares them for a world of precarious, feminised and under-valued work.
Paper short abstract:
Sydney’s recent COVD-19 outbreak mobilised many state and non-state actors to support and surveil communities. This presentation reflects public discourse about health and policing during a syndemic, from the perspective of someone working in the health system during this current outbreak.
Paper long abstract:
Neoliberal rollback of the welfare state has been challenged by the needs of people when a ‘lockdown’ occurs; a measure intended to stem the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and protect the community as a whole. Sydney’s recent outbreak mobilised many state and non-state actors to support and surveil communities. This short presentation is to provoke discussion around the state during this syndemic. It will consider public discourse about health and policing, from the perspective of someone working in the health system and mobilised during this current outbreak.