Europe faces a paradox. In a time of over-accumulation and unprecedented wealth, the distribution of resources seems to become ever more selective. This selectiveness takes specific forms in the contemporary conjuncture of neo-nationalism, productivism, and gender conservatism within which the question of who deserves what and why becomes a crucial driver of the creation, maintenance, and contestation of inequalities. This project explores un/deservingness as a key and ascending mode of reshaping inequality within the contemporary transformations of European societies. Its aim is to understand un/deservingness registers in their varieties, similarities, and contrasts in three highly contested socio-economic fields (citizenship, redistribution, and gender regimes), guided by the overall research question:
How do claims of and debates around un/deservingness play out
with regards to citizenship, redistribution, and gender regimes?
The project takes up timely European developments: the aftermath of recent policy changes regarding naturalisation/dual citizenship in Switzerland; family policy in Hungary; and tax/welfare reform in Austria.
Exploring these developments enables us to innovatively and comparatively extend research on migration, welfare, and social reproduction, while focusing not only on those deemed undeserving but also on those with privileged access to resources. The comparative set-up allows us to ask questions about the moralisation of inequality in contemporary Europe both related to specific cases and on a larger scale.
The study of un/deservingness requires combining various and largely disconnected bodies of literature in anthropology of migration, economy, and politics/policy (and beyond): poverty/welfare/austerity; citizenship/migration; and gender regimes/feminist scholarship. We further build on existing literature on the rise of conservative politics of neo-nationalism, productivism, and gender conservatism, while maintaining a focus on how un/deservingness plays out in specific policies implemented at this conjuncture.
Epistemologically, the project aims for (a) the contrastive comparison of cases and (b) proposes a framework for analysis, based on three dimensions of inquiry:
- Genealogies: the emergence of registers of un/deservingness, its logics and effects.
- Configurations: governance modes and agents that organise, maintain, or contest un/deservingness.
- Contestations: tensions and debates about inequality and its moralisation.
The project will apply a set of triangulated methods: ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and critical discourse analysis. The fieldwork in each case will take particular contestations as the empirical entry point from which to reveal and reconstruct different configurations and genealogies of un/deservingness on different scales (municipalities, cantons, companies, biographies, etc.).
In summary, the project studies the reshaping of inequality through moralising claims of un/deservingness. It contributes to understanding the conjuncture of neo-nationalism, gender conservatism, and productivism and by combining largely disconnected fields of literature, building a comparative analytical framework, and through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork.