Resurgent charity and the neoliberalizing social

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent decades have seen a resurgence of charity as a response to poverty, as political authorities celebrate non-state responses to social problems. Analyses of this resurgence view charity as a crutch for neoliberal programmes of welfare state retrenchment. This paper offers an alternative perspective. Bringing together a Latourian framework with Foucauldian analyses of neoliberal political ontology, we argue that both the mobilization of charity and welfare state restructuring are part of a broader project to ‘reassemble the social’ in accordance with (neo)liberal ideals of spontaneous, affective, self-regulating sociality. We analyse the practices of translation that seek to enrol charity in the neoliberalization of the social and highlight how this process contributes to the reconfiguring of citizenship, solidarity and the social status of the poor.