Front-line child welfare workers have long since preoccupied social work, sociological, and anthropological scholarship. This article employs phenomenological anthropology to attend to the embodied, experiential, and sensorial dimensions of front-line child welfare work. However, rather than renew calls to improve casework through increased institutional support, resilience-building, or retention efforts, I draw on caseworkers’ lived experiences to engage in a critical examination of the state’s role as parens patriae. What do caseworkers’ experiences “on the inside” reveal about the state’s capacity to care—both for its own frontline staff and the families in its purview? How do such experiences problematize our understanding of state accountability? Ultimately, how can they shift the scholarly fixation on developing “better” workers who can accommodate the ever-increasing demands of casework, to a larger critique of the state’s ability to serve as “the guardian and ultimate guarantor of child welfare” ( Boyden, 2005 : 195)? By locating caseworkers’ experiences within a larger context of “audit culture”—a climate of suspicion and surveillance that forces workers to constantly account for their productivity and performance—this article problematizes the state’s model of accountability and care ( Shore and Wright, 2000 ). I argue that, in light of the toxic social dynamics it creates, “audit culture” is incommensurable with the state’s role as parens patriae.
, 2014, 243pp., ISBN: 978-1-349-44610-0, £65.00 (Pbk) Carolyn Pedwell's Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy critiques the romanticisation of empathy as a catalyst for transnational social justice, a resolution to violence and misunderstanding, and an individual competency embodied by ideal neo-liberal citizens. Rather than question how politicians, activists and academics can more effectively cultivate empathy transnationally, Pedwell draws attention to the discursive, material and affective labour that Western deployments of empathy perform throughout the world. Namely, she considers how empathy has been employed in the service of biopolitical governmentality and neo-liberal subject-making. In this way, empathy serves not as a foundation for revolutionary social change, but as a vehicle for reproducing colonial hierarchies of power that privilege the political and corporate elite.Importantly for Pedwell, emotions cannot be understood as discrete entities or universal, biologically-rooted experiences contained within or possessed by a single individual. Following scholars like Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, Pedwell views empathy as relational, interactive and circulating. Rather than differentiate between affect-a term that many scholars associate with biological or physiological processes-and emotion-a term that scholars attribute to sociocultural expression and cognition-Pedwell uses both interchangeably; for Pedwell, dividing such terms fallaciously implies that a clear-cut distinction between biology and culture exists. Assuming this approach enables her to map the uneven circulation of empathy onto structural relations of power. In so doing, she demystifies empathy as the magical antidote for the trauma of colonial violence and political exclusion, or as an evolutionary adaptation that situates morality in human biology.
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