Paper short abstract:

Questions of social reproduction and identity in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, are interwoven with how care and social exclusion become discursively negotiated and practiced. The paper will discuss how values of freedom reproduce and traverse internal alienations and how they represent hope and precarity.

Paper long abstract:

Questions of social reproduction and identity in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, are intricately interwoven with how care and social exclusion become discursively negotiated and practiced. Different governmental agents and public discourses in Ulaanbaatar draw on concepts of freedom for purposes of distinction or inclusion and extend concepts of freedom "chölöö" and liberation to particular historical periods, summoning a common identity. Ulaanbaatar residents employed in the informal sector have ambivalently linked values of freedom to notions of social (in)equality and the restraints and (im)possibilities to (fully) care. David Harvey identified value(s) of freedom as core reference and key value within neoliberal discourses. However, discourses employing freedom can draw on an extended trajectory in Mongolia as it was equally referenced in socialist rhetoric, albeit under different premises. Moreover, the reference to and discourse concerning these values (re)produce social divisions causing "internal alienation" (Justin Stagl). Following the remark of a young mother employed in the informal sector, who claimed that violent social interactions in Ulaanbaatar during the time of the global pandemic have become comparable to the city's violence prevalent in 2008, the paper will explore the precarities, ambivalences and divisions involved in these references to freedom and their relation to identificatory practices and discourses. It will ask how social exclusion and violence are instituted and practices of care and hope traverse or reproduce these internal alienations.