1,720,969 research outputs found
Vivere le disuguaglianze urbane attraverso le istituzioni: il child welfare system a New York City
No full textIl saggio descrive come diverse forme di disuguaglianza sociale nel contesto urbano di New York vengono espresse e riprodotte dal sistema dei servizi sociali volti alla protezione dei minori e alla riabilitazione genitoriale
“What can I do when I know the system is wrong?”. Rappresentazioni delle disuguaglianze nel Child Welfare System a New York City
Full text linkMy 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
Revolving door. I servizi per i minori e la riproduzione delle disuguaglianze a New York
No full textIl volume prende in esame le forme di disuguaglianza e dissenso che vengono riprodotte all'interno del child welfare system a New York, ossia l'apparato istituzionale incaricato della tutela dei minori e della riabilitazione delle famiglie abusanti. Il sistema di protezione dei minori rappresenta un ambito privilegiato per esaminare come le disparità etnico-razziali, di genere e di classe delineino una categoria di soggetti “vulnerabili”, oggetto dell'apparato assistenziale e terapeutico dello Stato volto a ri-plasmare le famiglie secondo le priorità di una “cittadinanza corretta”. Il libro è rivolto agli studiosi di antropologia politica e delle istituzioni, ma anche a chi voglia esplorare come oggi si generino le profonde fratture sociali che sembrano marcare così fortemente la vita politica e la condizione delle minoranze negli USA, aprendo una finestra etnografica su un sistema istituzionale diverso ma che anticipa trasformazioni in atto anche nel panorama dei servizi italiani, dal privato sociale alle iniziative volte al coinvolgimento attivo della cittadinanza. Al contempo, il volume mostra come le istituzioni partecipino a fenomeni di razzializzazione, che sempre di più riguardano da vicino la quotidianità di chi fa ricerca e lavora in questi ambiti in Italia ed Europa
The elephant in the room. Silencing racialization in welfare regimes
No full textThis article focuses on the role that silence plays in three different contexts in relation to processes of racialisation in welfare regimes. The first is the silencing of race in the debate surrounding the welfare system in
the US and its historical role in reproducing racialisation, as in the case of the “welfare queen” stereotype.
My aim here is to highlight the active role played by what is not said, and how racialisation, which can be
defined as the attachment of racial meaning to an act, behaviour, or social entity, moves from one object to
the other without openly naming them as racial, but coding them as such. The second context of analysis
takes as a case study the child welfare system in New York and the difficulty of discussing its “racial disproportionality” – the overrepresentation of families of colour among its recipients. Race and racialisation are
indeed ubiquitous and intermittently silenced objects – “elephants in the room” – that are cautiously handled by experts and not in the public debate. On the other hand, this article takes into consideration how
the people impacted by the child welfare system voice racialisation, acknowledging it as being constantly on
the horizon of their interaction with institutions, and sharing their everyday experience of racial profiling,
biases, and discrimination. In the article, I reflect also on my identity and positionality in the field, trying
to expose and to analyze the mechanisms of silencing, suppression, and concealment this positionality could
entail, and the consequences for academic rigor and the ethical stakes of my investigation
The Politics of Racial Disproportionality of the Child Welfare System in New York
No full textThe aim of this chapter is to examine the analytical category of racial disproportionality in the New York City child welfare system. Racial disproportionality is a generic definition which indicates over or under representation of a certain racial group in a determined social phenomenon or institutional realm. It is usually considered the outcome of a discriminatory dynamic and in this specific case refers to the over-representation of people of color in the institutional arena developed to protect the well being of children subjected to abuse or neglect in their households. In New York, the 94% of children in state custody are indeed black and Latino. I trace a genealogy of racial disproportionality in the child welfare debate and how this category became an object for policies, political claims and activism. I examine in particular politics of counting and categorizing through race as a practice embedded in the administration of welfare state and, more widely, in the process of racial formation in the US. Looking at anti-racism groups, committees and grass-root associations working on racial disproportionality, I discuss through ethnographic examples how this data is rationalized, re-appropriated and explained depending on the social subject involved and how they struggle to tackle the social complexity of inequalities and exit from the conceptual inflation of race-based datas.
In my conclusions I argue that a strict focus on racial disproportionality could be an ambiguous conceptualizing frame if we do not take into account also other structural features, which co-produce this outcome, like class, gender and urban inequalities
«We only have rights over operators»
Full text linkThe presence and the perception of case workers is a fundamental element in crafting the attitudes and expectations of asylum seekers. Indeed, reception and welcoming centers are the main channels through which asylum seekers come to know the cultural context and the general perception of their presence in the hosting society. Social workers are often the lens asylum seekers use in order to read and orient themselves within the host system. They are also professional figures producing the bureaucratic identity of asylum seekers as subjects of human and civil rights. At the same time, social workers are the “eye” of the state in surveilling the conduct of asylum seekers and are expected to denounce nonconformity. As a consequence of such multiple roles, in a bureaucratic immigration system characterized by opacity and a high degree of conflict, the encounter between asylum seekers and social workers becomes a crucial site heavily invested with disparate meanings and desires. In particular I would like to stress the point on how regimes of suspects and the uncertainty paradigm become fundamental element in crafting asylum seekers subjectivities. On the other hand, I highlight how they are not passive, grateful and unaware suffering subjects, but they re-appropriate the double register of being seen as cheaters or victim and react to it. Their target, for lack of a wider spectrum of action and the weak links with hosting communities, are therefore their immediate and ordinary others: social workers and operators, which translate the bureaucratic machine to them, not always successfully and completely
Vivere le disuguaglianze urbane attraverso le istituzioni: il child welfare system a New York City
Full text linkQuesto articolo nasce come rielaborazione della mia ricerca di dottorato svoltasi a New York sulle interazioni fra famiglie e istituzioni nel sistema di presa a carico dei minori che hanno subito forme di abuso o negligenza da parte degli adulti affidatari.
Il child welfare system, ovvero questo complesso di istituzioni, si evidenzia come un'area di azione dei servizi sociali particolarmente controversa, che riflette, amplificate, le principali disuguaglianze che contraddistinguono la società statunitense. La maggior parte delle famiglie che vengono condizionate dalle procedure del child welfare sono quelle delle donne afroamericane e latine single con figli a carico ed economicamente svantaggiate. Il modo in cui i servizi sociali esercitano le loro funzioni è infatti consequenziale al tipo di sorveglianza a cui la popolazione è soggetta. Questa varia sopratutto rispetto alle diverse zone della città, e viene attuata tramite la presenza di istituzioni come scuole, ospedali e uffici dell'assistenza pubblica, a cui gli abitanti delle comunità a basso reddito, che a New York spesso coincidono con quelle di colore, si rivolgono.
Famiglie e mondo dell'associazionismo esprimono un dissenso diffuso verso il child welfare system ed equiparano il ruolo che i servizi di protezione dei minori svolgono nelle comunità della inner-city a quello di polizia e sistema penale, specialmente per il loro abuso dello strumento della rimozione dei bambini dalle famiglie e per l'inefficacia dei servizi di rieducazione alla genitorialità obbligatori per ottenere la riunificazione
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