Ethnographies of Deservingness

Jelena Tošić is Assistant Professor of Transcultural Studies at the University of St. Gallen and lecturer at the University of Vienna. Her current writings focus on borderlands in Southeast Europe, forced migration, citizenship and moralisations of inequality.

“Ethnographies of deservingness is timely, refreshing, and, in terms of the trend it foretells, devastating in equal measure…Ultimately, this volume cogently delivers a cohesive yet varied story of how the mandate of deservingness is embedded ever-deeper in Euro-American social fabric, shoring up existing hierarchies, maintaining existing power structures, and ensuring their continuance.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute“This is an excellent collection that has a coherence that is rare in edited volumes. It makes a major contribution to social scientific understandings of inequality through its focus on categorisations of ‘deservingness’. In what I think is a brilliant move, it combines conceptual and historical analysis with a focus on three themes that are rarely brought together in a single volume, namely: social welfare, migration and personal/household debt.” • Paul Stubbs, Former Co-President of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy of the American Anthropological Association“The book addresses the concept of deservingness from different points of view. The four main parts of the book are rich in ethnography, have a strong theoretical background and offer to the reader a panoramic view that takes into consideration the (un)deservingness as a processual and relational notion rather than a condition.” • Georgeta Stoica, Université de La Réunion

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Deservingness: Reassessing the Moral Dimensions of InequalityAndreas Streinzer and Jelena TošićPart I: Deservingness – Genealogies, Struggles and IdeologiesChapter 1. Caring for the Old and Letting Them Die: A Political Economy of Human WorthSusana NarotzkyChapter 2. Must the Tired and Poor ´Stand on Their Own Two Feet`? Tools for Analyzing How Migrants’ Deservingness is ReckonedSarah S. Willen and Jennifer CookChapter 3. Deserving Classes without Class: Explaining the Neo-Nationalist AscendencyDon KalbChapter 4. A Methodological, Reflexive and Comparative Approach to DeservingnessErik BährePart II: Categories, Policies and Negotiations of DeservingnessChapter 5. Hartz IV. Affective and Sensual Registers of Moral InferiorityStefan WellgrafChapter 6. Unemployment, Deservingness and Ideological Apparatuses: A Case Study from Turin, ItalyCarlo CapelloChapter 7. The Politics of Austerity Welfare: Charity, Discourses of Deservingness and Human Needs in a Portuguese Church ParishPatricia MatosChapter 8. ‘Here, Morality is a Sense of Entitlement’: Citizenship, Deservingness, and Inequality in Suburban AmericaElisa LanariPart III: The (Un)Deserving Migrant/RefugeeChapter 9. Ambivalences of (Un)Deservingness: Tracing Vulnerability in the EU Border RegimeSabine StrasserChapter 10. The Politics of Deservingness among Resettled Bhutanese RefugeesNicole HoellererChapter 11. Suffering and Vulnerability Reconfigured. Refugee Images of Hungarian Migrants Working in Refugee Accommodation Institutions in GermanyIldikó Zakariás and Margit FeischmidtPart IV: Debt Relations – State, Market Actors and DebtorsChapter 12. Do Mortgagors in Hardship Deserve Debt Relief? Legitimizing and Challenging Inequality during the Spanish Home Repossessions CrisisIrene SabatéChapter 13. Households on Trial: Over-Indebtedness, State and Moral Struggles in GreeceTheodora VettaChapter 14. Victims, Patriots and Middle Class: The (Un)Deservingness of Debtors in Post–Credit Boom CroatiaMarek MikušAfterword: Differentiating DeservingnessJames G. CarrierIndex