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Accepted Paper:
Social assistance and state authoritarianism: an ethnographic view at neoliberal management of poverty
Marta Venceslao
(University of Barcelona)
Patricia Bertolin
(Universitat de Barcelona)
Under the title of this paper, we would like to address some of the most notorious transformations in the field of social assistance in Catalonia. At a time when, in the name of the so-called economic crisis, the argument of social rights has been dismantled, social assistance mechanisms are increasingly reorganised as instruments of containment, reform and control of those sectors that seem to be outside the norm. On the basis of an ethnographic study conducted between 2020 and 2023, we propose to adress the forms taken by a type of violence that, inscribed in the rhetoric of inclusion, is exercised on people who turn to social assistance institutions. Institutions that attend to individuals and groups that fall into the (deteriorated) categories previously constructed by the field of social intervention: homeless, unaccompanied immigrant minors, drug addicts, mentally ill, etc., and which exercise a series of more or less subtle forms of coercion with a normalising purpose that, in the final analysis, operates as a device of social control. In this sense, and following the analysis initiated by Wacquant, we will raise some considerations about the prison dimension of the practices in the so-called field of social intervention, framing the analysis in the contemporary modalities of misery management by the State.