“What can I do when I know the system is wrong?”. Rappresentazioni delle disuguaglianze nel Child Welfare System a New York City

Abstract

My dissertation focuses on the child welfare system in New York City, which consists of services developed to protect the well being of children subjected to abuse or neglect and the rehabilitation of family's members charged with their endangerment. The child welfare system and its institutional arena is “racially disproportionate”: 95% of families in the system are black and Latino. I analyze the debate around social and racial justice issues within and without the institutional field of the child welfare system and how the practice of community partnership is imagined as a way to address many of its problematic aspects. My aim is to show how social suffering, racialization and poverty are interconnected in shaping the child welfare pool of recipients. I am looking especially at the way in which the child welfare system is experienced and conceptualized by parents, who often perceived it as punitive and invasive. My research questions focus on how the discrepancy between institutional actors and local communities is performed and re-enacted in the practices related to child welfare, and how parents manage and choose to engage in them in order to get their children back. Putting an accent on the process of co-production of a “dense” system of control and subjectification of the population, my ethnography describes how multiple layers of conflicting practices inhabit a governmental device which is primarily about surveillance, disciplining, labeling and citizen-making. In order to do so, I analyze and interrogate discourses and practices of everyday interactions between practitioners and families in a variety of settings: support groups and parenting skill classes for parents, family courts, community-based NGO's and anti-racist organizers who are working towards policy changes in the system.