Noting the pervasiveness of the adoption of "responsibility" as a core ideal of neoliberal governance, the contributors to Competing Responsibilities challenge contemporary understandings and critiques of that concept in political, social, and ethical life. They reveal that neoliberalism's reification of the responsible subject masks the myriad forms of individual and collective responsibility that people engage with in their everyday lives, from accountability, self-sufficiency, and prudence to care, obligation, and culpability. The essays—which combine social theory with ethnographic research from Europe, North America, Africa, and New Zealand—address a wide range of topics, including critiques of corporate social responsibility practices; the relationships between public and private responsibilities in the context of state violence; the tension between calls on individuals and imperatives to groups to prevent the transmission of HIV; audit culture; and how health is cast as a citizenship issue. Competing Responsibilities allows for the examination of modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or coexist with the neoliberal focus on the individual cultivation of the self.
Contributors
Barry D. Adam, Elizabeth Anne Davis, Filippa Lentzos, Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski, Nikolas Rose, Rosalind Shaw, Cris Shore, Jessica M. Smith, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle, Jarrett Zigon
- Cover
- Contents
- Introduction. Competing Responsibilities: Reckoning Personal Responsibility, Care for the Other, and the Social Contract in Contemporary Life
- Part I. Theoretical Departures
- One. Making Us Resilient: Responsible Citizens for Uncertain Times
- Two. Attunement: Rethinking Responsibility
- Part II. States, Companies, and Communities
- Three. Reciprocal Responsibilities: Struggles over (New and Old) Social Contracts, Environmental Pollution, and Childhood Asthma in the Czech Republic
- Four. Audit Culture and the Politics of Responsibility: Beyond Neoliberal Responsibilization?
- Five. From Corporate Social Responsibility to Creating Shared Value: Contesting Responsibilization and the Mining Industry
- Part III. Violence
- Six. “The Information Is Out There”: Transparency, Responsibility, and the Missing in Cyprus
- Seven. Justice and Its Doubles: Producing Postwar Responsibilities in Sierra Leone
- Part IV. Intimate Ties
- Eight. The Politics of Responsibility in HIV
- Nine. Responsibilities of the Third Age and the Intimate Politics of Sociality in Poland
- Ten. Genetic Bystanders: Familial Responsibility and the State’s Accountability to Veterans of Nuclear Tests
- References
- Contributors
- Index
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Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
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