Lived Experiences of People at the Margins in Times of Austerity
Status: This talk is in preparation - details may change
Status: This talk has been cancelled
‘A policy that kills’: Austerity, welfare reform and legacies of state coercion at Britain’s margins
In my presentation, I draw upon my recently published book ‘Personalizing the State: an anthropology of law, politics and welfare in Austerity Britain’ to provide an in-depth ethnographic insight into the lived experiences of austerity at Britain’s margins. In Britain’s marginalised neighbourhoods, including its post-industrial council estates, a decade of austerity rule and welfare reform have come on top of long-standing legacies of state coercion that have operated across areas of social welfare, criminal justice and housing policies and exposed their residents to economic and political dispossession. By considering residents’ daily acts of engagement with, withdrawal from, and sometimes outright resistance to dominant configurations of citizenship, I trace austerity’s more quotidian but profound impact on the spaces of social reproduction that the liberal state has typically deemed private: the domestic spaces and communities. I argue that austerity policies have played a central part in cementing Britain’s political crisis – from widespread voter withdrawal to the alleged rise of populism, as evidenced in the ‘Brexit vote’ – at a time when mechanisms for collectivising redistributive demands have been silenced.
Date:
20 February 2020, 16:15 (Thursday, 5th week, Hilary 2020)
Venue:
32-42 Wellington Square (Barnett House), 32-42 Wellington Square OX1 2ER
Venue Details:
Violet Butler Room
Speaker:
Dr Insa Koch (LSE)
Organising department:
Department of Social Policy and Intervention
Organiser:
Professor Mary Daly (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
events@spi.ox.ac.uk
Part of:
Austerity and Beyond? Oxford Institute of Social Policy Hilary Term seminar series
Booking required?:
Not required
Booking url:
https://www.spi.ox.ac.uk/events
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Ruth Moore
