Social Suffering in the Neoliberal Age

Social Suffering in the Neoliberal Age
Author: Karen Soldatic
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2022-04-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000580822

This book provides a rich synthesis of research and theory of nascent and emergent critically engaged work examining changing welfare structures, regimes and technologies and the social suffering that is generated in everyday lives. By rigorously examining social security restructuring with the turn to austerity governance and its daily practices of managing, regulating and subordinating individuals, peoples and communities, this collection delineates the machinery of state power and logics designed to manage, contain and control the lives of some of the most poorest and marginalised citizens who are reliant on social welfare income payments. A core strength of the book is, first, its unpacking of austerity governance across diverse communities and, second, the elevation of community resistance and mobilisation against the very measures of austerity. Combined, the work maps out the logics of state power and everyday practices of embedded contestation and confrontation. Using the case study of Australia to discuss sociolegal recategorisations, automation of welfare governance, technologies of policy design and delivery, conditionality and systems of penalisation, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students of sociology, critical theory, social policy, social work and disability studies, Indigenous studies and settler-colonialism.

Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age

Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age
Author: Bruce Rogers-Vaughn
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2016-11-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1137553391

This volume offers a detailed analysis of how the current phase of capitalism is eating away at social, interpersonal, and psychological health. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary body of research, Bruce Rogers-Vaughn describes an emerging form of human distress—what he calls ‘third order suffering’—that is rapidly becoming normative. Moreover, this new paradigm of affliction is increasingly entangled with already-existing genres of misery, such as sexism, racism, and class struggle, mutating their appearances and mystifying their intersections. Along the way, Rogers-Vaughn presents stimulating reflections on how widespread views regarding secularization and postmodernity may divert attention from contemporary capitalism as the material origin of these developments. Finally, he explores his own clinical practice, which yields clues for addressing the double unconsciousness of third order suffering and outlining a vision for caring for souls in these troubling times.

Karl Polanyi

Karl Polanyi
Author: Gareth Dale
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2010-06-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0745640710

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German. This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.

Alter-Globalization

Alter-Globalization
Author: Geoffrey Pleyers
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2013-04-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0745655084

Contrary to the common view that globalization undermines social agency, ‘alter-globalization activists', that is, those who contest globalization in its neo-liberal form, have developed new ways to become actors in the global age. They propose alternatives to Washington Consensus policies, implement horizontal and participatory organization models and promote a nascent global public space. Rather than being anti-globalization, these activists have built a truly global movement that has gathered citizens, committed intellectuals, indigenous, farmers, dalits and NGOs against neoliberal policies in street demonstrations and Social Forums all over the world, from Bangalore to Seattle and from Porto Alegre to Nairobi. This book analyses this worldwide movement on the bases of extensive field research conducted since 1999. Alter-Globalization provides a comprehensive account of these critical global forces and their attempts to answer one of the major challenges of our time: How can citizens and civil society contribute to the building of a fairer, sustainable and more democratic co-existence of human beings in a global world?

The Moral Neoliberal

The Moral Neoliberal
Author: Andrea Muehlebach
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2012-05-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226545415

Morality is often imagined to be at odds with capitalism and its focus on the bottom line, but in The Moral Neoliberal morality is shown as the opposite: an indispensible tool for capitalist transformation. Set within the shifting landscape of neoliberal welfare reform in the Lombardy region of Italy, Andrea Muehlebach tracks the phenomenal rise of voluntarism in the wake of the state’s withdrawal of social service programs. Using anthropological tools, she shows how socialist volunteers are interpreting their unwaged labor as an expression of social solidarity, with Catholic volunteers thinking of theirs as an expression of charity and love. Such interpretations pave the way for a mass mobilization of an ethical citizenry that is put to work by the state. Visiting several sites across the region, from Milanese high schools to the offices of state social workers to the homes of the needy, Muehlebach mounts a powerful argument that the neoliberal state nurtures selflessness in order to cement some of its most controversial reforms. At the same time, she also shows how the insertion of such an anticapitalist narrative into the heart of neoliberalization can have unintended consequences.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism

A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Author: David Harvey
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2007-01-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 019162294X

Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a reconstitution of state powers such that privatization, finance, and market processes are emphasized. State interventions in the economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to provide for the welfare of its citizens are diminished. David Harvey, author of 'The New Imperialism' and 'The Condition of Postmodernity', here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. While Thatcher and Reagan are often cited as primary authors of this neoliberal turn, Harvey shows how a complex of forces, from Chile to China and from New York City to Mexico City, have also played their part. In addition he explores the continuities and contrasts between neoliberalism of the Clinton sort and the recent turn towards neoconservative imperialism of George W. Bush. Finally, through critical engagement with this history, Harvey constructs a framework not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.

Refiguring Universities in an Age of Neoliberalism

Refiguring Universities in an Age of Neoliberalism
Author: Louise J. Lawrence
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2021-06-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3030733718

This book examines the role of compassion in refiguring the university. Plotting a reimagining of the university through care, other-regard, and a commitment to act in response to the suffering of others, the author draws on various humanities disciplines to illuminate the potential of compassion in the campus. The book asks how the sector can reclaim the university from the tides of neoliberalism, inequalities and increased workloads, and which moral principles and competencies would need to be championed and instilled to build inclusive citizenship and positive connection with others. A value that is too scarcely taught, experienced, or advocated in contexts of higher education, compassion is reframed as an essential pillar of the university and a means to an epistemically just campus and curricula.

Cognitive Capitalism

Cognitive Capitalism
Author: Yann Moulier-Boutang
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2011
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0745647324

This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;

Treating Autism Today

Treating Autism Today
Author: Laura Tarsia
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2021-11-18
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000465489

Drawing together an international range of psychoanalytic practitioners, this collection provides a critique of mainstream models of autism, looking at the conceptual and ideological underpinnings of the behavioural and cognitive approaches popular today. The first book to provide a psychoanalytic unpacking of standard non-analytic approaches, it offers a series of critical essays on mainstream assumptions, examining their history, foundations, and validity from a variety of angles. The authors consider, from the Lacanian perspective, the hypothesis of the biological-genetic causality of autism, as well as the claims of these approaches to offer effective therapy. These discussions are historically contextualised by an introduction and afterword that also provide pointers and references to further reading on Lacanian approaches to autism. Illustrated throughout by clinical examples, Treating Autism Today will be of interest to Lacanian clinicians and scholars, as well as psychotherapists, psychologists, and those working with children diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum.

La Misère Du Monde

La Misère Du Monde
Author: Pierre Bourdieu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 646
Release: 1999
Genre: Alienation (Social psychology)
ISBN: 9780745615936

This book can be read like a series of short stories - the story of a steel worker who was laid off after twenty years in the same factory and who now struggles to support his family on unemployment benefits and a part-time job; the story of a trade unionist who finds his goals undermined by the changing nature of work; the story of a family from Algeria living in a housing estate in the outskirts of Paris whose members have to cope with pervasive, everyday forms of racism; the story of a school teacher confronted with urban violence; and many others as well. Reading these stories enables one to understand these people's lives and the forms of social suffering which are part of them. And the reader will see that this book offers not only a distinctive method for analysing social life, but also another way of practising politics.