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- Convenors:
-
Maxim Bolt
(University of Oxford)
Jon Schubert (University of Basel)
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- Discussants:
-
Deborah James
(LSE)
Anne Pitcher (University of Michigan)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH102
- Start time:
- 29 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Approaching the 'middle class' as object of state intervention, this panel investigates the role of formal institutions and processes in mediating class aspirations and contributing to class formation. It explores how, through these, ideas of the state itself are reconfigured.
Long Abstract:
The 'African middle class' has become the subject of euphoric narratives of growth and improvement. Various definitions have underpinned global attention from mainstream media, international financial institutions, and social scientists. Whether identified with aspiration, consumption, the market, or democracy, middle-class people are often viewed as model citizens and 'agents of transformation'. They have also become the object of government interventions and social engineering, ranging from the 'national bourgeoisie' of (post-)socialist countries to the presumed 'bastion of liberal democracy' targeted by international development agencies and IFIs.
This panel explores the connections between bureaucratic infrastructures and middle-class lives, complicating sharp dichotomies between state procedures and apparently independent self-making. Rather than focusing on 'African middle class' aspirations as such, the panel invites scholars to investigate the role of formal institutions and processes in mediating these aspirations. How do state institutions and processes (e.g. inheritance; taxation; homeownership, business or entrepreneurship schemes) contribute to class formation? How do they both deliver on the promise of social betterment and reproduce entrenched inequalities? How do they generate urban-rural cleavages or connections? How, along the way, are ideas and ideals of the state, and 'state'/'citizen' relations, played out and negotiated in interactions with bureaucrats?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The middle classes and the suburbs are mutually constitutive in contemporary urban Africa. Processes of circulation and accretion involving land and housing shore up claims to middle classness, producing distinctive suburban landscapes in what was, 20 years ago, the peri-urban edge of the city.
Paper long abstract:
If the African middle class is growing, how is this group shaping contemporary urban landscapes? This paper begins to sketch out an answer by examining the relationship between middle class growth and suburbanization in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The middle classes and the suburbs are mutually constitutive in contemporary urban Africa. Processes of circulation and accretion involving land and housing shore up claims to middle classness at the same time that they produce distinctive suburban landscapes in what was, 20 years ago, the peri-urban edge of the city.
I argue that the suburb must be understood as a spatial, built form as much as it is a particular social space in which class difference is reproduced socially and culturally. Class difference is made and reproduced through the practices of acquiring land, building a house, and living a suburban lifestyle. Such practices involve local and global circulations: of (among other things) people, cash, documents, building materials, cars, design ideas, and soft furnishings. But they also involve accretion - of assets such as houses and cars, of ways of doing things such as planning and building, and of the built environment, such as landscapes. Suburban landscapes are the outcome of decades of overlapping colonial and post-colonial laws, planning procedures, and attempts at urban development; ad hoc donor and private sector interventions; and the accretion of thousands of individual building projects.
Paper short abstract:
Based on recent ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, this article explores the articulations of new forms of middle class housing strategies on the ‘inside’ of a post-socialist political cosmology.
Paper long abstract:
Based on recent ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, this article explores the articulations of new forms of middle class housing strategies on the 'inside' of a post-socialist political cosmology. Focusing on private housing strategies in Maputo, we identify two modalities of middle classness that are being articulated within a socio-political system that is still infused by the aesthetics of socialism despite its collapse in the mid-1980s. Fearing the effects of downward mobility, members of the upper middle class who are close to the governing Frelimo party seeks to visibly embody a political ideology that they no longer believe in. By contrast, through national housing policies, members of the lower middle class attempt to create functioning enclaves where they can experiment with forms of privatization that are otherwise privileged the wealthy elite. Through an exploration of the material and symbolic role of housing in systems of stratification, we outline the contours of a new analytical approach to middle classness in Mozambique and discuss how this could relate to the global south more generally.
Paper short abstract:
Exploring class discrimination, gentrification and social exclusivity; this paper seeks to question the ideology of developer led "inclusive" / "exclusive" urban regeneration in the post-colonial city of Johannesburg.
Paper long abstract:
This essay explores urban regeneration in Johannesburg using Maboneng Precinct as its case study. Specifically, it seeks to investigate Maboneng's model which, according to its developers, is aimed at creating an inclusive space. However, this urban regeneration model really is a simulation. Drawing from primary research conducted in Maboneng through interviews and literature, this essay argues that urban regeneration models like Maboneng, exclude poor people, who do not fit in with the preferred social class. And seeks to further understand why. The research finds that, there is a subtle, veiled sense of class discrimination existing within the urban regenerated neighbourhood of Maboneng. This is contradictory to its marketing strategy on their website, which states that it aims at cultivating an "inclusive and integrated" urban community. This claim is merely consistent with mainstream literature which state that urban regeneration models encourage social integration of people from all economic and social backgrounds.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the formal institutional dimensions of middle-class reproduction in Johannesburg, by focusing on will-making. Extending our analytical reach across generations, wills reveal the place of legal-bureaucratic processes in middle-class families and their plans to pass on property.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the formal institutional dimensions of middle-class reproduction in Johannesburg, South Africa, by focusing on will-making. The new middle class has grown exponentially since apartheid. But, amidst high unemployment, the demands of kin compete with efforts to ensure security and status for the next generation. This stratum grows out of an older black middle class rooted in education and occupation. Yet its members also long strove to acquire property. Wills offered ways to contest racialised legislation through exemption from 'customary law' and therefore 'native' status vis-à-vis inheritance. In the post-apartheid era, in Johannesburg's extremely diverse middle class, will-making takes on new significance. Amidst the rapid expansion of financial services, it becomes a target for new business opportunities, extended services to customers, good-cause outreach programmes, and public discussion. State-administered inheritance practices themselves - with their transfers at death to named, individual beneficiaries - are no simple fit with South African middle-class lives. Apartheid-era township houses, defined as collective family accommodation, now provoke intense disagreements. As state institutions and processes refract people's plans and demands, this paper reveals the importance of inheritance for our understanding of middle classes. Such a focus throws into relief the legal, material, symbolic and socially productive dimensions of property, as people strive to pass it on. Different dimensions of class formation and reproduction intersect here: investment and accumulation; planning and aspiration; care and exclusion; dispute and regulation. Extending our analytical reach across generations, wills illuminate the place of legal-bureaucratic processes in middle-class families.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will investigate entrepreneurship schemes employed by the Kenyan state as a means to further economic development and create job opportunities. These schemes, I argue, are tailored to different groups of people, namely (aspiring) lower and middle class entrepreneurs.
Paper long abstract:
In accordance with the country's long-term development plan the Vision 2030 entrepreneurship development is accorded high importance by the Kenyan government, especially through the newly funded Micro and Small Enterprises Authority. Moreover, entrepreneurship features strongly in the local discourse as an opportunity for self-actualization and to fulfill aspirations of a middle class lifestyle. Entrepreneurship is advertised as a career option both through the media and from the government side.
The government programs targeting (future) entrepreneurs run on two levels, I argue. One main target group are the young unemployed without own resources at their disposal. These are catered for especially through diverse funding activities and bodies which aim to provide them with start-up capital for the foundation of a business. To them, entrepreneurship promises a way to reach middle class status. Other initiatives, however, target entrepreneurs who have reached the status of middle class already, i.e. those with (more or less) established businesses and some capital at their disposal. Here, the aim is to better market their products and increase their range nationally and even internationally, through sponsorships for fairs and exhibitions.
The aim of this paper is, therefore, to present entrepreneurship schemes undertaken by the Kenyan government both from the initiators' perspective and from that of the entrepreneurs benefiting from them. I will illustrate the envisioned goals as well as the opportunities and drawbacks of these programs as experienced by their recipients.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the link between the promotion of entrepreneurship as career choice for university graduates in Ethiopia and the reconfiguration of responsibilities between state and citizens this entails. Thus young people’s aspirations of joining the middle class are channelled.
Paper long abstract:
Since the early 2000s the Ethiopian government has invested heavily into the expansion of the higher educational sector. Graduates of higher education institutes are supposed to contribute to the government's goal of transforming Ethiopia into a middle-income country by 2025. For many graduates however educational status does not translate into becoming part of the nascent Ethiopian middle class, instead they become part of a growing group of unemployed youth. One proposed solution to the unemployment problem is to encourage graduates to start their own business, to achieve this end young people are encouraged to join entrepreneurship training programs. However rather than putting an emphasis on technical skills needed to run a business, these programmes target the transformation of attitudes and seek to encourage participants to take on the responsibility for their own economic advancement. This paper argues that entrepreneurship programmes in Ethiopia serve to channel young people's aspirations of joining the middle class in a way that suggests their ambitions can only be realized through rigorous self-management and the acceptance of economic uncertainty as a personal responsibility. In doing so these programmes mark a decisive break with the past, as historically the Ethiopian state under different regimes saw it as its responsibility to guarantee employment to those who joined its higher educational institutions. The paper is based on the examination of official discourse, expert interviews and observation of entrepreneurship training programs, it draws on a conceptualisation of "responsibilisation" as a governmental technique.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the tensions between socialist and neoliberal imaginaries of middle classness through an ethnographic mapping of the professional selves of technocrats in the Mozambican mining sector.
Paper long abstract:
Global imaginaries of middle classness, although resonating in very different ways in specific national contexts, are more often than not imagined to conform to broadly Western, capitalist-liberal aspirations — a detached house in the suburbs, a certain type of car, a specific number of children, and globalised markers of consumption. However, as the material from ethnographic fieldwork in Mozambique's mining sector presented in this paper reveals, alternative imaginings of middle classness, based on technical competence, cosmopolitanism, and a certain kind of work ethics persist as afterlives of socialist technical assistance to the country's mining sector amongst the technocrats managing the sector today, under the condition of neoliberal capitalism. This paper then explores the tensions between the values of middle classness promoted by a sociopolitical project that has all but vanished today as a global emancipatory reference, and the contemporary economic and political realities of needing to promote a business-friendly climate, and the moral ambiguities this engenders.