workfare, post-Soviet austerity and the ethics of freedom Ozolina, Liene. creator text bibliography enk Manchester Manchester University Press 2019 monographic eng

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x, 150 p. This book is an ethnography of the politics of waiting. While the global political economy is usually imagined through metaphors of acceleration and speed, the book reveals waiting as the shadow temporality of the contemporary logic of governance. The ethnographic site for this analysis is a state-run unemployment office in Latvia. This site not only grants the author unique access to observing everyday implementation of social assistance programmes that use acceleration and waiting as forms of control, but also serves as a vantage point from which to compare Western and post-Soviet welfare policy designs. The book thus contributes to current debates across sociology and anthropology around the increasingly coercive forms of social control, by examining ethnographic forms of statecraft that have emerged over several decades of neoliberalism. The ethnographic perspective reveals how time shapes a nation's identity, as well as one's sense of self, in culturally specific ways. The book traces how both the Soviet past, with its narratives of building communist at an accelerated speed while waiting patiently for a better future, as well as the post-Soviet nationalist narratives of waiting as a sacrifice for freedom, come to play a role in this particular case of the politics of waiting. Series editor's preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Waiting as an organising logic -- Temporalities of austerity -- The anxious subject -- The will to live -- Spaces of the expelled -- Epilogue: waiting for freedom -- References -- Index. Liene Ozolin̦a. Includes bibliographical references and index. Unemployment Unemployment Latvia Public welfare Public welfare Latvia Public welfare Political aspects Public welfare Political aspects Latvia HD5797.85 .O96 2019 1526126257 (hbk.) 9781526126252 (hbk.) 180924 on1053902828