Social Suffering in the Neoliberal Age

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.

Karen Soldatic is Professor, School of Social Sciences, and Institute Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Karen's research engages with critical questions of inequality, disability, race and ethnicity, and sexuality and gender diversity under settler-colonial regimes of power and within the global South and East. She obtained her PhD (Distinction) in 2010 from the University of Western Australia. Louise St Guillaume is an Early Career Researcher in the field of disability studies and lecturer and discipline coordinator of sociology at The University of Notre Dame Australia. She was a Summer Scholar at the federal Australian Parliamentary Library in 2014 and the 2019 E.G. Whitlam Fellow at the Whitlam Institute within Western Sydney University. She is currently a Fellow at the Whitlam Institute. Her research often examines how Australian social security policies intersect and operate to govern the lives of people with disability.

0.Introduction: Social suffering and resistance in the social protection system. Part I: Structure, power and social suffering. 1.'Problem family' representations: the construction of intergenerational disadvantage in policy. 2.Corroding motherhood: Australian single mothers' social suffering and supplication. 3.Violence-induced social suffering and the toxic mix of automated and privatised social security: the case of the Cashless Debit Card in Australia. 4.Public service ethics and the Income Compliance Program. 5.Barriers to recovery: the impact of disability social security reform on the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians living with mental health conditions. 6.Neoliberal principles and the perpetuation of ableism in the economic participation stream of the Information, Linkages and Capacity Building program. 7.Whose aged care? My Aged Care representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and ageing. 8.Torture in the Meantime: Australia's mandatory detention regime for asylum seekers. Part II: Practices of resistance and hope. 9.Subjectification, suffering and emotional resistance: life on the Cashless Debit Card. 10.Universal income and services for people with disability in Australia: lessons from the blind pension. 11.Neoliberalism and suffering in higher education: compassionate pedagogy as an act of resistance. 12.Transforming colonial social suffering: strategies of hope and resistance by LGBTIQ+ Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial Australia. 13. First Nations organisations and strategies of disruption and resistance to settler-colonial governance in Australia. 14. Conclusion: Making suffering legible.