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- Convenors:
-
Jeremy Morris
(Aarhus University)
Anne Sophie Grauslund (Aarhus University)
Borbála Kovács (Babeș-Bolyai University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Main Site Tower (MST), 02/009
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel focusses on ethnographic accounts of street-level bureaucrat encounters; how encounters animate social worlds and relationships beyond their arenas (Brown et al. 2017), articulate contingent processes within organisations, and elucidate emotional labour and moral agency.
Long Abstract:
Michael Lipsky’s classic insight into the discretion of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) tends to founder in anthropology because of its implicit methodological individualism (Kjaerulff 2021). This has had the unfortunate effect of anthropologists not always taking seriously enough the political and economic processes embedded within state-society interactions at the micro level and the potential for ethnographic understandings of microregulation. Instead, despite the unprecedented intervention that SLBs make today in social reproduction, anthropologists have often preferred instead to stop short, satisfied with a discursive and imaginary (de)construction of the pluralist state (Marcus 2008). In this panel, we invite papers from ethnographers who are alert to SLB-encounters, as ‘quotidian and ubiquitous procedures’ (Brown et al. 2017) where we take seriously the bureaucrat as interpretive agent (Bierschenk and Sardan 2019). Further, we are interested in how encounters animate social worlds and relationships beyond their arenas (Brown et al. 2017), articulate contingent processes within state organisations, and elucidate the emotional labour and moral agency (Fassin 2015) of both sides of the ‘desk’, as much as they ‘reproduce [social] atomization’ (Dubois 2010). Finally, we call on colleagues to respond in this panel to Marilyn Strathern’s proposal (2017) to uncover ‘doubled’ and ‘curtailed’ roles and processes, formal and informal, written into or acted out of bureaucratic procedures and materiality (Carswell and De Neve 2020). We welcome papers on all aspects of the bureaucratic encounter but particularly in welfare, workfare, and the contracted-out competition state (Shore and Wright 2015).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper offers an anthropological examination of state provisioned visits by children's nurses (sundhedsplejersker) to new parents in Denmark as a ground for the production and negotiation of moral perceptions of 'proper' parenting and conceptions of health, normality and deviance of children.
Paper long abstract:
When having a child in Denmark, it is customary for parents to receive a course of visits from a public children's nurse (sundhedsplejerske), where health and development of the child and the wellbeing of the parents are checked and discussed. The meeting between new parents and visiting children's nurses is an overlooked ground for the production and negotiation of moral perceptions of 'proper' parenting as well as health, normality and deviance of children and parenthood. In this paper, I will explore the epistemological grounds on which the nurses build their advice and recommendations and examine them in relation to the parents' perspectives on infants and parenting. First, I examine what I call 'living by numbers': How parents relate to themselves and their children through technologies and the numbers they generate - and how the nurses encourage this practice. Then, I explore the phenomenological traits of the nurses' work, their advice about learning to trust one's gut and listen to one's body and feelings. I relate this to how parents often struggle to 'find' and get in touch with their instincts, and I examine the metrics as a way of handling the uncertainty and anxiety related to having small children. Lastly, I explore the tensions between these different approaches to infant parenting, a tension also found in the nursing discipline's background in both biomedicine and care work, and I examine how the official structures and disciplinary background of the nurses affect how the parents buy into the different approaches.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore hierarchies of suffering and knowledge figurations in on-farm animal welfare inspections. In contemplating the broader consequences of this politics of care, I trace the figuration of the 'suffering body' as it transpires through the exercise of authority.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I address the work of Danish animal welfare controllers based on two theoretical impulses. First of all, I explore the role of veterinary and pathological expertise in the 'knowledge figurations' of animal welfare control addressing how care practices are "embedded within the interest and expertise of these institutions" (Ogden, 2008). Secondly, I examine how animal welfare bureaucracy engages a politics of care (Fassin, 2005; Ticktin, 2011) 'operating' on both controllers, farmers and animals.
Bureaucratic encounters remain scarcely studied beyond their human contexts (however, see Anneberg et al., 2013). A few notable studies from within legal anthropology and legal geography, however, have brought attention to how professional code of conduct and exercise of authority inform care and control in multispecies "care" institutions such as the zoo and conservation sites (Braverman, 2012; Srinivasan, 2017). In addressing the role of state-authorized veterinarians performing on-farm inspections, I extend the previous literature by examining how bureaucratic knowledge production comes to establish hierarchies of evidence, 'trivializing' certain practices while 'moralizing' about others. Based on analysis of interview material and control reports, I explore how the imperative to minimize suffering translates into extra-legal constructs such as 'the necessary sanction' and 'effective control.' Finally, while farmers and controllers are competing over 'proper care,' I ask what happens to the animals themselves as they become legible as subjects in a politics of suffering?
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues for conceptualizing the welfare state as enacted, i.e., brought into being in practice in and through a range of sociomaterial contexts. It elaborates this approach through an examination of the ambiguous state-citizen relations that Amsterdam’s Parent and Child Teams enact.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropologists have successfully shown how interactions between citizens and state or state-like actors materialize “the state” and state-citizen relations. Oddly, such approaches have rarely been used with respect to the welfare state in the Global North. Instead, ethnographers working on welfare or public services in Western Europe or North America often turn to an examination of disciplinary aspects of various policies, and the types of subjectification they entail. They follow how policies are translated across different arenas and scales, and analyze such services in terms of street-level bureaucracy. While these approaches generate valuable insights, they tell us less about the ways in which welfare encounters enact wider sociopolitical arrangements and worlds. How “the state” is enacted and how it figures in people’s lives tends to recede from view.
In this paper, I explore what an anthropology of the state has to offer to our understanding of the welfare state in the Global North. I argue for conceptualizing the welfare state as enacted, i.e., brought into being in practice in and through a range of sociomaterial contexts. I illustrate this approach through an examination of the state-citizen relations that Amsterdam’s Parent and Child Teams enact. I show that the Parent and Child Team professionals craft ambiguous state-citizen relations that celebrate self-reliance and empowerment, while maintaining a space for state intervention into family lives in the name of child welfare.
Paper short abstract:
By exploring street-level bureaucrat's interactions with parents and the emotional labour involved in the production, processing and eventual closing of cases, my paper will shed light on the making of capable parents and caring experts in an Ivorian social welfare centre.
Paper long abstract:
Following de Koning et al (2020) I look at “parenting encounters” between parents and representations of state institutions as performances, negotiations and contestations of normativities of good parenthood. What it involves taking good care of a child is partly determined by state policies or transnational conventions (thus as the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child), but is enacted and interpreted on the grounds in the interactions between social welfare officers and parents. These interactions involve emotional labour of building trust with clients and "fighting" for those who are considered vulnerable subjects in need of protection and care, and translating policies of good parenthood into the social world of their clients.
In my paper I will engage with Ivorian social welfare officers and their bureaucratic working routines in the processing of cases. By focusing on the bureaucratic aspects of their work (categorizing, documenting, writing, producing reports, numbers, statistics) and ethnographically exploring how cases are produced, discussed, processed and eventually solved and closed, my paper will shed light on the actual making of capable parents and caring experts at once. In fact, I will show how these two are represented as mutually connected. The paper is based on ethnographic research in an Ivorian social welfare centre and will build on ethnographic date produced from both sides of the desk: participating in counselling and evaluating good parental care with the social welfare officers and accompanying parents in search of expert assistance in times of crisis.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores interpretive and emotional work of street level bureaucrats working to support integration of low-literate adult refugees. It focuses particulraly on interpretations of ‘integration’ in their work, and their ‘double’ role as providers and gatekeepers of different forms of support
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores interpretive processes and emotional labor of street level bureaucrats (SLB) working to support integration of low-literate adult refugees. It focuses particularly on how various and shifting interpretations of ‘integration’ play a role in their work, and how this in turn informs their ‘double’ role as both providers and gatekeepers of different forms of support. The paper is based on in-depth interviews with SLB in multiple public services in Trondheim, Norway, including Refugee Reception services, National Welfare services, Adult Education centers, and Refugee Health services. These services are in various ways charged with the task of implementing national integration policy goals, in which employment and economic self sufficiency is described as most important, reflecting the notion of employment as a moral obligation for ‘good citizenship’ inherent in the overarching workfare policies. When it comes to low-literate adult refugees, however, the goal of employment is understood as unrealistic and counter-productive by many SLB working with this group. They report that they to a little degree ‘succeed’ and that the efforts they put into achieving this goal are inadequate and ‘meaningless’, and also negatively impact relations of trust and enforce their role as gatekeepers, rather than providers, of support. The paper provides an ethnographic account and a discussion of how SLB deal with this dilemma, particularly focusing on how (re-)interpretations of ‘integration’ play a role. The account also sheds light on the emotional labor involved, seen against the desire to ‘do good’ which many of the SLB subscribe to.