Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Claire Farrugia Entering the Public: Private Acts of Sharing in a Marketised Welfare State
This paper is focused on the sharing practices of women from different African backgrounds living in
Western Sydney. It takes as its starting point that sharing is a dynamic socio-spatial practice; the sharing of
material resources, support and friendship going beyond de-politicised, functionalist explanations of migrant
solidarity and social capital. The paper is particularly concerned with what happens to informal networks of
sharing when they come in contact with an increasingly marketised welfare state. Drawing on ethnographic
research and semstructured interviews with women who broker between informal networks of sharing and
state funded resettlement services, it will argue that sharing problematizes popular and political
understandings of what it means to be an active, public citizen. Despite the fact brokers slip between
salaried and unsalaried, public participation and back into private spaces of the home, sharing continues to
be a key way that women resist marginalisation and account for their presence in the nation.
David Primrose Poor Behaviour?: Behavioural Economics and Neoliberal Biopolitics in the World Development
Report 2015
Behavioural development economics (BDE) has rapidly gained prominence as offering a novel diagnosis of,
and prescription for alleviating, poverty in the global South. Epitomised by the World Bank’s World
Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, Behaviour (WDR), proponents have depicted behaviouralism as a
cogent alternative to the conceptual and political presuppositions of neoclassical economics. In particular,
they have pointed to the tradition’s rejection of neoclassical axioms of hyper-rationality and their
embodiment in Homo Economicus, in favour of greater empirical realism in describing decision-making. On
this basis, BDE investigates the biases, heuristics and contextual factors impacting how the poor make
choices affecting their economic well-being, and then design and promulgate institutional arrangements
correcting for their decision-making to facilitate rational, welfare-enhancing choices to escape poverty.
However, drawing on Foucault’s work on neoliberal biopolitical governmentality, this paper presents a
discursive analysis of the WDR and other selected policy documents from the global South to make the case
that BDE buttresses, rather than undermines, a neoclassical approach to development. Specifically,
behavioural theory is presented as an “apparatus of power-knowledge”, whereby specific policy techniques
are aligned with positivist truths about the market to demarcate what does not exist in reality – governable
yet free economic subjects – and then expose them a dichotomy of truth or falsity based on their market
behaviour. That is, the tradition produces and legitimises a vision of Homo Economicus as the normative
subject necessary for securing developmental outcomes through the market. This economisation of the
social subject, in turn, is demonstrated as depoliticising poverty, in that policy interventions centre on
augmenting the capacity of poor subjects for “rational” decision-making as both the means and ends of
development. The paper articulates this argument in four sections. First, it presents a brief overview of the
key tenets of BDE. It then reveals this tradition to be structured around the theoretical problematic of
neoclassical humanism: studying the conditions of existence for the harmonious reconciliation of individual
and collective rationalities. Within this problematic, while recognising its empirical falsity, Homo Economicus
functions as the essence of subjectivity that would serve as the normative “microfoundation” of that
harmonious social order. Section three utilises textual evidence from the WDR and other policy documents
to establish how BDE positions this subject as what Foucault terms the “interface” of government-individual
relations.
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