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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the daily practices of Beninese prosecutors when deciding whether to indict suspected criminals and shows how those embodying the ‘punitive arm’ of the state balance repressive agendas with notions of fairness, social peace, and humanitarianism.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last few years, the Republic of Benin has been sliding down democratic rankings. International observers highlight, amongst other things, the severity of the most recent criminal law reforms – leading to the steady growth of the prison population for the last five years. Reports also point to the biased nature of judicial institutions and increased lack of trust from the Beninese population. Building on an ethnographic study of a special criminal court, this paper explores the daily practices of prosecutors when deciding whether to indict suspected criminals and shows how those embodying the ‘punitive arm’ of the state balance repressive agendas with notions of fairness, social peace, and humanitarianism. It shows how they consider the severity of the accusations, the weight of the evidence, the potential sentence and the wider social consequences of taking a case to trial. At the theoretical level, this contribution combines insights from sociolegal studies and from the anthropology of the state. It reflects on the practices, and the agency of public servants faced with ‘repressive turns’ and shows how they sometimes fight for humanitarian values ‘from within’, using the legal tools at their disposal. Reflecting on discretion and on the place of care in the prosecutorial office will also help unpack the professional ethos of Beninese prosecutors, in a context where both ordinary citizens and legal professionals are consistently describing them as biased and ‘under orders’.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper ethnographically examines the everyday justifications and tensions inherent in contemporary public protection policing in the UK. It unpacks officials’ emotional and moral reflections on the competing values and objectives of their work, and historically situates their will to care.

Paper long abstract:

Successive Westminster governments over the past decade have increasingly committed to take ‘vulnerability’ seriously, pledging to recognise, criminalise and relieve various forms of re-discovered human misery. Meanwhile, law enforcement as an institution has faced heightened global public scrutiny, with its legitimacy cast as a subject of popular debate. In response, UK police forces increasingly assert that the ‘protection of vulnerable people from harm’ is one of most important goods that they pursue, blending this objective with more ‘classic’ law-and-order justifications. Moreover, a core benchmark in official inspections of UK police force effectiveness since 2015 is the identification, protection and support of ‘vulnerable people’. To this end, police forces have restructured, creating specialised public protection departments to operate alongside conventional patrol and investigative teams.

Based on ethnographic research in UK police forces, this paper examines the everyday justifications and tensions inherent in vulnerability policing. Public protection officials commonly assert the comparative advantage of their uniquely relational and compassionate style of working that differentiates them from typical manifestations of law enforcement; and they see their work as uniquely positioned to gain victims’ trust, transform their lives and, in the process, challenge discourses of the police as unresponsive and/or uncaring. As such, their will to care is part of a broader project of rebuilding legitimacy in contemporary policing across the Global North. It features a recursive logic that takes failure as its condition of possibility and deploys officials’ emotional-moral labour at the coalface of multiple crises facing the UK public sector today.

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Paper short abstract:

The Turkish Police underwent intensive reforms in the 2000s, which generated a range of social projects. Such projects felt like suffocating care, which I take as an analytic to explore how populist authoritarianism builds a new relational space where ‘will to care’ and ‘will to punish’ converge.

Paper long abstract:

The Turkish National Police underwent intensive reforms during the 2000s, which generated a range of social projects implemented across different police units with the support of other governmental branches focusing on social policies, welfare and social security. These projects helped police experiment with new, mostly sensorial, policing methods in addition to teaching people how to see and feel like the police. People became subjects of proactive policing projects, and their homes became laboratories of emergent state care. Policing through social projects often felt like suffocating care, especially for regular recipients of social assistance. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research between 2015-2017 in different social settings, from police stations to home visits, the talk analyzes the convergence of a service-oriented bureaucratic ethos with a populist appeal to serve ‘the people’. I take 'suffocating care’ as an analytic to explore how populist authoritarianism makes inroads into everyday life and builds a new relational space where ‘will to care’ and ‘will to punish’ converge.

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This paper, existing at the intersection of penal politics and household anthropology, centres the 'toxic family' (Garbarino 1995), and the nuanced ways in which those 'caregivers' on the margins are systematically punished by state actors on account of their relationship to criminal offenders.

Paper long abstract:

This paper, existing at the intersection of penal politics and household anthropology, draws on Garbarino's (1995) conceptualisation of familial toxicity to suggest that 'caregivers' on the margins are systematically punished by state actors on account of their relationship to criminal offenders. Adopting an understanding of 'the state' as a violent means through which the most vulnerable are deemed deserving of punishment (Fassin 2015)––often on the basis of their own marginality––I contend that designated 'care workers' are rendered responsible for the crimes of their kin (O'Brien 2008). This includes populations who are merited protection solely on the basis of their own idealised innocence, including mothers and impoverished women (Garwood 2014).

Building on recent work by sociologist Imogen Tyler (2020), I offer a theoretical reconsideration of stigma as a political tool operated by state institutions to shame, other, and disappear those seen as threatening the social good. I further posit that, in creating folk devils out of offenders' mothers, those who perform the 'moral labour' of motherhood are rendered secondary criminals by the state itself.

Highlighting the myriad ways in which intersectional experiences of marginalisation shape vulnerable women's experiences with the carceral state, this paper considers the role of stigma in stratifying, excluding, and punishing the kin of offenders––often under the guise of state protection and paradoxical humanitarian logics.

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This paper examines how clinical and legal professionals understand, interpret and mobilise guilt and shame during legal proceedings for mentally unwell offenders. Drawing on interviews, I describe the ethical labour of the doctors and lawyers who read and write medicolegal reports.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how clinical and legal professionals understand, interpret and mobilise guilt and shame during legal proceedings for mentally unwell offenders. An initial hypothesis was that highly educated professionals are simply policing people from more deprived backgrounds, using a moral language of care in which guilt and shame play a key role, the function of which is to individualise responsibility for social deviance. However, my research – based on interviews with the professionals that write and make use of medicolegal reports - nuances this picture, illuminating the ethical labour that bridges the gaping inequality between doctors and lawyers on one side, and prisoners or patients on the other.

Feelings of guilt and shame play an important role in the assessment of mentally unwell offenders. Clinicians consider these emotions while forming clinical judgements regarding diagnosis, personality, and risk. Clinicians then make decisions based on these assessments, not just for treatment plans but also for medicolegal reports that influence court processes.

Sociologists and philosophers have drawn links not just with trauma, adverse childhood experiences and offences, but also with class, gender and ethnicity. Shame has been described as a key technology of responsibilisation, contributing to the production and maintenance of socioeconomic inequality. Recent anthropological studies have enriched the study of responsibility, demonstrating the overlapping, multidirectional push and pull of competing responsibilities. This paper advances the literature on responsibility and responsibilisation by investigating how and why particular emotions are pathologised, and who benefits or loses out from such pathologisation.

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In this paper, I trace how bureaucrats at a government office for supported employment in the Helsinki region in Finland mix caring and punitive bureaucratic registers, thereby conditioning persons with disabilities into labouring subjects through the mediation of socially accepted behaviour.

Paper long abstract:

Finnish social institutions, often seen as the epitome of the welfare state model in the Global North, are morphing historically distinct institutional designs and technologies due to escalating neoliberal imperatives. How do bureaucrats in these institutional contexts both reproduce and challenge government-imposed requirements that combine a traditionally “caring” rhetoric on the one hand and a traditionally “punitive” rhetoric on the other? In this paper, I offer an ethnographic analysis of the interaction between work coaches and disability service clients at a government office for supported employment in the Helsinki region in Finland. I trace how this interaction conditions persons with disabilities to become particular kinds of labouring subjects through the mediation and reproduction of socially accepted capacities and abilities. The attribution of a successful labouring subjectivity is contingent on the varied understandings of both what the interaction between the coach and the client should encompass and what constitutes orderly behaviour that merits care and disorderly behaviour that deserves punitive action. Through strategic and creative linguistic practice, the work coaches mix registers and genres in overlapping ways to resolve tensions that emerge within the situation, thereby rendering the interaction inherently ambivalent. The ambivalent efforts of the work coaches embed affective and emotional labour into a punitive bureaucratic apparatus, thus making the will to care and the will to punish often simultaneously emergent and mutually constitutive, rather than distinct and mutually exclusive. Together, then, interactants untangle bureaucratic double-binds that the client must navigate in order to gain access to the labour market.

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This paper looks at violence enacted by humanitarian actors and police in the name of caring for ‘child slaves’ in the fishing sector in Ghana, and the competing visions of freedom, sociality, care, civility, and childhood at play in contestations around these efforts to tackle ‘child slavery’.

Paper long abstract:

US- and British-based antislavery campaigners have called for urgent action against ‘child slavery’ in global south countries, and in Ghana over the past decade various humanitarian NGOs have worked with the Police Service and other government agencies on interventions to liberate and rehabilitate ‘trafficked’ and ‘enslaved’ children. These actions include the threatened and actual use of violence to remove children, the criminalisation of survival strategies used by people living in poverty, and the institutionalisation of children, leading to separation from kin for protracted time periods. Drawing on research on antislavery NGOs and the impact of their interventions on remote island fishing communities on Lake Volta, this paper considers the violence enacted in the name of caring for ‘child slaves’ and the competing visions of freedom, sociality, care, civility, and childhood that are at play in efforts to tackle ‘child slavery’ and resistance to such efforts on the part of communities affected. It explores the fact that whilst Ghanaian humanitarian actors do not necessarily view the problem in the same light as do US-based NGOs and their donors, but for a variety of reasons, many nonetheless, either willingly or unwillingly, participate in the ‘rescue missions’, forced institutionalisation of children, violence against rural communities and other punitive ‘humanitarian’ interventions which the study identified within the Ghanaian child labour abolitionist landscape.

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Paper short abstract:

Our paper examines food practices in two contexts of immigration detention, the United States and Mexico. Drawing on interviews with border agents, we show how agents use food to exacerbate or alleviate the punishment experienced by detained migrants.

Paper long abstract:

Millions of meals are served in immigration detention centres each year. The periodic ritual of food consumption, as in other carceral settings, takes place under constant surveillance. At the same time, food can be used by state agents to communicate their moral judgements about migrants in their custody and engage in discretionary acts. Agents can either extend extra or more favorable foods for those migrants they find deserving or withhold those same discretionary practices from those who they find undeserving. Our paper examines food practices in two contexts of immigration detention, the United States and Mexico. Drawing on interviews with border agents in both contexts, we explore how they use food to exacerbate or alleviate the punishment experienced by migrants while in detention in Mexico and the United States. We argue that food and foodways are part of the disciplinary machinery in these settings, are used to reproduce the notion of migrants’ (un)deservingness as well as mobilised as an expression of care-control.

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Paper short abstract:

Through extensive fieldwork in Portuguese prison settings I discuss the impact of inequalities on women's backgrounds and examine their distinct challenges in navigating societal norms and justice systems.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation delves into the intricate relationship between security and safety with a specific focus on female offenders. Through extensive fieldwork in Portuguese prison settings, the research uncovers the dynamic nature of this conceptual relationship and its interconnectedness with notions of risk, vulnerability, and exclusion, revealing the profound impact of inequalities on women's backgrounds and examining their distinct challenges in navigating societal norms and justice systems.

It aims to emphasize the urgency of deepening our understanding of the nexus that exists between the public institutions of security (the security apparatus), people’s experience of safety, and their involvement in activities that are considered to be criminal, thus offering insights into the complexities of gender and prison confinement. According to the written law, the criminal act is an offense and a threat to collective security. Nevertheless, I argue that for women who are excluded from this normativity, or from the structures that confer it, it can be a resource or a necessity to address the insecurity they experience.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper challenges prevailing anthropological views regarding care and punishment in welfare by exploring a solidary food network in Madrid. It highlights welfare as a relational practice shaped by reciprocity expectations, proposing an inductive approach to actors’ understandings of fairness.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropological analyses of welfare typically highlight the state's ambivalent role as dispenser of both care and punishment. Prevailing narratives within the discipline tend to reproduce explanatory themes centred around “neoliberal” ideas of productivist deservingness and self-sufficiency. The proposed paper challenges these notions by exploring the nuanced realities of non-state, street-level welfare actors, as observed during a 12-month field research within a solidary food network in the working-class district of Puente de Vallecas, Madrid.

The examined network spontaneously emerged as neighbours’ response to the collapse of state welfare mechanisms during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over time, it transformed into a stable welfare source for families grappling with ongoing economic hardship. The original cohort of predominantly progressive, left-wing volunteers producing food baskets gradually diminished, as frustration over beneficiaries’ "chronic" dependence grew. Remaining volunteers sought cultivate self-management among recipient families by requiring their participation in basket co-production. Conflicts over labor involvement, stock distribution, and theft ensued, with families demanding punitive measures against members jeopardising the group's material security. Volunteers viewed families’ attitudes as ingrained "system" or "neoliberal" values, and aspired to shape the network into a politically prefigurative project through pedagogy.

This study underscores welfare as a relational practice, subject to actors' expectations of reciprocity. Subjective notions of fair exchange in welfare systems may be more tied to individuals' interpretations of their efforts for others' well-being than to "neoliberal" ideology. The paper proposes an inductive approach to actors' understandings of welfare as representative of moral systems on their own right.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper zooms in on the work of child welfare caseworkers, exploring how they enforce middle-class norms and act as ‘social police officers’ punishing poverty. I question how state agents reconcile the punitive nature of their work with their altruistic motivation for choosing this profession.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary Hungary, under the fifth Orbán-government, implements “selective pronatalist” (Szikra, 2018) policies tying social rights to having children (Fodor, 2022). These policies target heterosexual families in formal employment with tax benefits, marriage and child-related loans and debt reductions (Geva, 2021). However, they disadvantage the Romani and/or lower-class population (Kóczé, 2016), and are justified through productivist and anti-gender equality discourses and the sentimentalization of feminised carework (Fodor, 2022).

Drawing on ethnographic material on the subjectivation of Hungarian child welfare caseworkers, I explore how state agents assess clients' “responsible parenting” through “middle-class” norms and values. I argue that the current policy regime’s upward wealth redistribution and scapegoating of racialised minorities subjectivise these street-level bureaucrats to become ‘social police officers’ who punish clients for their poverty.

I ask: How do state agents reconcile the punitive nature of their work with their altruistic motivations for entering this profession? The insensitivity of the Hungarian social and family policy regime to vulnerabilities faced by adult citizens contrasts with a focus on children’s vulnerabilities as the ultimate innocent subject to be protected. This leads to practices blind to the structural poverty of the entire family unit, advocating child removal as a solution to child poverty.

I argue that “middle-classing” acts as a boundary maker with caseworkers demanding elements of “middle-classness” from their clients. Failure to comply with these requirements, in the absence of institutional tools for support, instead of being effects of structural inequality, gets re-framed as clients not fulfilling their responsibilities as parents, which warrants punishment.

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This paper explores the ways compassionate care operates in the everyday life of a prison. What does it enable for both prison staff and prisoners? How does compassionate care bridge the gap between recognition of structural violence and neoliberal responsibilization?

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic research in a Swiss prison, this paper looks at staff in a Swiss prison engaging in compassionate care for prisoners “despite” the violent structure of incarceration, largely ineffectual in terms of re-socialisation and crime prevention. Meanwhile, punishment is dealt with as an impersonal matter-of-fact, imposed from the outside. Prison is punishment but nobody working within it considers themselves punishing.

As there is very limited space for staff to effect change on the circumstances of prisoners within rigid structures, “care takers” - no longer “wardens” - fall back on trying to help prisoners by helping them “to help themselves”. Often, self-help takes the form of adjusting their personal outlook on imprisonment, finding purpose and assuming responsibility. This carries a significant promise of hope and agency for both prisoners and staff in an otherwise mortifying setting. But in return for hope and agency, prisoners are not only made responsible for their criminal behaviour but also for their sentence, the success of their release, and even prison conditions themselves.

I argue that compassionate care is both a purveyor of meaningful human connections vital to surviving imprisonment, a tool to create meaning and purpose for both staff and prisoners, but it also fits into a neoliberal tendency towards responsibilisation of prisoners. Structural violence as a cause of imprisonment is recognised compassionately, but is left behind in a pragmatic attempt to make imprisonment bearable. In prisons, compassionate care can be simultaneously empowering, responsibilising and infantilising.

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In this paper, I describe frontline social and mental healthcare work as the business of temporarily stabilizing an otherwise unstable world. I argue that, if they do so successfully, frontline workers appear as risk experts, enabling them to determine the limits of the state vis-à-vis citizens.

Paper long abstract:

In the Netherlands, policy makers take so-called ‘care-avoiders’ to be both ‘at risk’ and ‘risky’: at risk because they are prone to suffering and a premature death, and risky because they cause nuisance and may turn violent towards the people around them, including professionals. In 2023/2024, I conducted fieldwork in a team of social and mental healthcare workers charged with convincing care avoiders to accept the care available to them. I found that, while trying to seduce, pressure, and coerce their clients into becoming care accepting citizens, they were wary of the tendency to pathologize them. Instead, they presented clients as the victims of a ‘careless’ and ‘out of control’ system, while theorizing the use of violence by both care avoiders and police and healthcare professionals as the logical consequence of that system. In fact, reading the situation as such, they spent much of their time urging fellow frontline workers to become 'caring' and 'controlling' professionals, while also trying to undo the current mental healthcare system in favor of a system rooted in existing ecologies of care. In this paper, I describe these efforts of changing citizens and the system to analyze frontline work as the business of temporarily stabilizing an otherwise unstable world. I argue that, if they did so successfully, frontline workers achieved a sense of authority over their clients and fellow frontline workers, and, moreover, on risk itself, enabling them to put into practice what they thought were the proper limits of the state vis-à-vis citizens.