Time: 5:00 - 7:00pm Venue: Francis Bancroft Building, FB4.04/08, Mile End Campus
Centre for Ethics and Politics, School of Business and Management
Marta Malo de Molina, Militant researcher, Madrid
Debora Avila Cantos, Departamento de Filosofia - Universidad de Castilla la Mancha
Sandro Mezzadra, Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni, Storia - Alma Mater Studiorum, Universita di Bologna
Manuela Zechner, Centre for Ethics and Politics, School of Business and Management - Queen Mary, University of London
Analysing the impact of the crisis of social services for migrants in Madrid, Avila and Malo speak about the implementation of a neoliberal logic in social governance. In this sense, starting from an analysis of the institutional discourses on migrants and migration, they focus on the new management of social services. The dispositives for governance that emerge from there are articulated around new processes of measure and control, contention and subjection not only of society but of social services’ workers themselves. Contemporary governance, contrary to the conception of the welfare state as a regulator of inequalities, appears as a model of intervention on elements of instability and of crisis that displaces tensions and conflicts, from the responsibility of the state towards individualised workers and users in social services.
The article is the result of a long interconnected process of conversations, interviews and workshops run with a platform of social services workers in Madrid, aiming to produce a compass to the complex system of externalisation of social services. "An alliance between users and facilitators of social services", in which the authors underline the role of the 'agency for social rights' of Seco Social Centre, of 'Ferrocarril Clandestino' (a migrants rights network) and of the local Platform of Villaverde that participated in the discussion.
For further information contact Ade Alele at a.alele@qmul.ac.uk or 020 7882 8577.