Social Suffering in the Neoliberal Age

Karen Soldatic is Professor, School of Social Sciences, and Institute Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Karen’s research engages with critical questions of inequality, disability, race and ethnicity, and sexuality and gender diversity under settler-colonial regimes of power and within the global South and East. She obtained her PhD (Distinction) in 2010 from the University of Western Australia. Louise St Guillaume is an Early Career Researcher in the field of disability studies and lecturer and discipline coordinator of sociology at The University of Notre Dame Australia. She was a Summer Scholar at the federal Australian Parliamentary Library in 2014 and the 2019 E.G. Whitlam Fellow at the Whitlam Institute within Western Sydney University. She is currently a Fellow at the Whitlam Institute. Her research often examines how Australian social security policies intersect and operate to govern the lives of people with disability.

0.Introduction: Social suffering and resistance in the social protection system. Part I: Structure, power and social suffering. 1.‘Problem family’ representations: the construction of intergenerational disadvantage in policy. 2.Corroding motherhood: Australian single mothers’ social suffering and supplication. 3.Violence-induced social suffering and the toxic mix of automated and privatised social security: the case of the Cashless Debit Card in Australia. 4.Public service ethics and the Income Compliance Program. 5.Barriers to recovery: the impact of disability social security reform on the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians living with mental health conditions. 6.Neoliberal principles and the perpetuation of ableism in the economic participation stream of the Information, Linkages and Capacity Building program. 7.Whose aged care? My Aged Care representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and ageing. 8.Torture in the Meantime: Australia’s mandatory detention regime for asylum seekers. Part II: Practices of resistance and hope. 9.Subjectification, suffering and emotional resistance: life on the Cashless Debit Card. 10.Universal income and services for people with disability in Australia: lessons from the blind pension. 11.Neoliberalism and suffering in higher education: compassionate pedagogy as an act of resistance. 12.Transforming colonial social suffering: strategies of hope and resistance by LGBTIQ+ Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial Australia. 13. First Nations organisations and strategies of disruption and resistance to settler-colonial governance in Australia. 14. Conclusion: Making suffering legible.