Talk: The Production and Penalization of the Precariat in the Neoliberal Age

Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of social space and symbolic power, I build a bridge between my books Urban Outcastsand Punishing the Poor to bring into a single model the emergence of the “precariat” and shifts in public policies aimed at managing problem populations and territories in the dualizing city.  I track the rise of a new regime of “advanced marginality” characterized by the fragmentation of wage labor, the recoiling of social protection, and territorial stigmatization. I show how states have responded to the objective and subjective social insecurity this regime has spawned through “punitive containment,” by deploying the police, courts, and carceral institutions in and around neighborhoods of relegation.  I propose that international variations in the intensity, concentration, and segmentation of advanced  marginality  are matched by differences in the  vigor and modalities of penalization, in keeping with  the architecture of the bureaucratic field and the texture of citizenship evolved by each country.