Crisis, austerity, and everyday life [electronic resource] : living in a time of diminishing expectations /
Bhattacharyya, Gargi.author.
Will austerity never end? This timely and insightful book argues that austerity seeks to set the terms of political and economic life for the foreseeable future, extending techniques of exclusion to ever-greater sections of the population.
Description based upon print version of record.
Cover; Crisis, Austerity, and Everyday Life; Contents; Acknowledgements; 1: Is it Too Late to Write a Book about Austerity?; Less than consent; What does 'post-consent' mean?; Taking things away; What do I mean by 'the degradation of politics'?; Periodising the age of austerity; The hard road to austerity; Authoritarian populism without the populism; Dismantling the claims of citizenship; The groundwork for the institutionalisation of despair; The great moving right show goes global; Crisis and everyday life; Reasons to be fearful; Obedience and safety; Loving authority despite ourselves
2: The Primacy of the Economic and the Degradation of PoliticsThe primacy of the economic; Economism and electoral politics; Economics and stupidity; The moment of anti-politics; The widespread disengagement with mainstream electoral politics across a range of locations; The emergence of civil society movements that mark themselves as unlike 'politics as usual'; The failure of a number of public institutions and public understandings of these processes
The increasing scepticism towards arguments about the public good that are presented by political representatives or (state-sponsored) experts, including accounts of economic benefitsIs 'anti-politics' something new?; Corporate influence and democratic process; Popular imagination and the pleasures of uncovering corruption; Learning acquiescence through media practices; An escalation of anti-politics?; Low-wage economies; Finding laughter in the world of institutionalised despair; Imagining the masses; Laughter; What about fear?
3: The Institutionalisation of Despair and Diminishing ExpectationsSetting the scene for diminishing expectations; Punitive welfare; Welfare as a method of creating despair; Creating the context to disallow claims for betterment; Social immobility; Crushing hope through institutional means; The terror of ageing; Disentitling disability; Staging suffering as a reminder of precarity; Inculcating fear and destitution as a weapon; Hunger; Dismantling collective bonds; What is entitlement?; Changing techniques to establish differential entitlement
Erosions in the quality of work as a formative aspect of diminishing expectationsAre all workers prone to employee cynicism?; Why is cynicism good enough for them but not for us?; Nostalgia for a time that never was; Cynicism in a time of post-consent and our relationships to each other; 4: Austerity and Extending the Racial State; The racial state under austerity; Looking for the austerity state; Terror and the racial state; Is the austerity state a racial state?; Immigration controls: marking the shifting border between the deserving and the other; Contradictory bordering
Fencing and gate-keeping
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Will austerity never end? This timely and insightful book argues that austerity seeks to set the terms of political and economic life for the foreseeable future, extending techniques of exclusion to ever-greater sections of the population.
Poverty.
Welfare state.
Political sociology.
Economic sociology.
Social structure.
Social inequality.
Sociology.
Development Aid.
Politics of the Welfare State.
Political Sociology.
Organizational Studies, Economic Sociology.
Social Structure, Social Inequality.
Sociology, general.