400015 SE States, welfare and bureaucratic practices (2017W)

In the social sciences the image of the state as a coherent unit together with the vision of an abstract neutral bureaucracy has been deconstructed since quite some time. Instead scholars emphasize the state as a historically situated reality, embodied in the work of its agents and negotiated in encounters with citizens. Different disciplines differentiate state images from state practices and insist on the empirical study of state performances within the everyday working of local bureaucracies. While many studies have focused on negative or coercive sides of states such as border regimes and military practices, the seminar will focus on another central field of state activity, namely welfare bureaucracies, that could be seen as the benevolent side of the state its left hand as Bourdieu called it. At the centre of our discussions will be the ethnographic research of participants as well as other scholars who research the workings of concrete state institutions. Important question are how these bureaucratic interactions mobilize values and emotions thereby (re)produce the state as well as classificatory systems of inclusion and forms of marginalization.