CONTENT:

This entry is prompted by an article which applies WPR to the UK’s “Safeguarding Strategy: Unaccompanied asylum seeking and refugee children” (Rigby et al. 2019), a policy produced by the Home Office in 2017 (see ref. below). I have selected this article because it provides a useful illustration of what can be accomplished in terms of critical analysis through exploring problematizations, a task facilitated through applying WPR. The article also shows the potential of adopting “social flesh” as a new ethico-political imaginary to reflect on important political issues (though the article by Rigby et al. does not adopt the term “social flesh”).

I have mentioned “social flesh” in two previous Research Hub entries (30 June, 31 July 2020). Together, Chris Beasley and I have produced several articles offering “social flesh” as a critical analytic concept to rethink the ways in which governmental practices conceptualize bodies (Bacchi and Beasley 2002, 2005; Beasley and Bacchi 2000, 2005, 2007, 2012). Specifically, we wish to challenge a dominant conceptualization which sets “vulnerable” bodies against other bodies. “Vulnerable” bodies, we argue, reflect a view that people are controlled by their biology, that they are (so to speak) at the mercy of their bodies. This view is contrasted to a perceived autonomous rational actor who keeps the body in line (see Horsell 2020 in relation to conceptions of “disability”). While this dichotomy may appear to be familiar, mapping onto fleshly women versus cerebral men, we show that these conceptualisations do not always map directly onto gender categories (Bacchi and Beasley 2002). To our minds, it follows that there is a need to consider the politics that produces these contrasting ontologies. Our hope is that “social flesh” might serve to disrupt the current dominant neoliberal ethic that privileges autonomous, rational actors who are held responsible for their lives and health. It does this by drawing attention to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources (Beasley and Bacchi 2007).

Beasley and I also developed “social flesh” in order to engage with the expansive feminist literature on care, vulnerability and precarity, and the attempts in these developments to contest neoliberal premises about “atomistic individualism” (see McCormack and Salmenniemi 2016, and Koivunen et al. 2018). Our concern with these literatures highlights two points: first, the tendency in some accounts to fall back on presumed individual characteristics (generosity); and second, the often, inadvertent acceptance of a hierarchical relationship between those who can care versus those who need care (e.g. “the vulnerable”).

The article by Rigby et al. provides a useful illustration of our thinking. I will firstly outline how they apply WPR and then focus directly on their contribution to debates around care and caring. Of particular interest is the way in which care enters the analysis through the application of WPR.

Rigby et al. start by discussing how unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC) are represented and hence produced in specific ways in media reports. They then explain the focus of their analysis: “how the issue is discursively constructed within the policies that have been proposed to ‘address children’s needs’” (Rigby et al. 2019: 3-5; emphasis in original).

Accepting that WPR is “not a formula per se”, a point I have made previously (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 24; Eveline and Bacchi 2010: 155), the authors decide to focus on Questions 1 and 4 of a WPR analysis “as a conceptual checklist for our critical reading of the policy document” (see Bacchi WPR CHART). They adopt Keller’s (2013) term “statement-events” as their starting point, which in their careful analysis works well to identify what I call “proposals” and “proposed solutions”. In my view, the latter terms are preferable starting points for two reasons: first, a focus on “proposed solutions” turns the analysis immediately to problematizations – the key to a Foucauldian analysis of governing practices (by seeing what is proposed it is possible to understand what is produced as the “problem”); and second, such a focus also indicates that what is of interest are underlying knowledges rather than language (see Bacchi and Bonham 2014). Rigby et al. (2019: 8) make this very point: “With the ‘refugee crisis’ continuing to evolve, the WPR approach provides a way to open up the knowledges surrounding it and the effects of knowledge production by considering how UASC are constructed and represented in a key policy document”.

The authors begin by identifying problem representations within the “Safeguarding Strategy” (Home Office 2017). They note several underlying assumptions (“field assumptions”; see Research Hub entry 31 May 2020), specifically the distinction drawn between “legal” and “safe” routes of arrival on one side, and “clandestine” and “dangerous” routes on the other. They note how this distinction operates to “make up” (see Hacking 2007) categories of children as less or more deserving of “assistance”, at the same time producing the children as “responsibilised subjects with agency” (Rigby et al. 2019: 8):

‘By emphasising the different routes of arrival, the policy effectively creates an ontological register for the children who are portrayed as exercising their agency in “choosing” to either enter the country legally or illegally’. (Rigby et al. 2019: 13)

The article proceeds to apply the concept of nesting from WPR (Bacchi 2009: 21) to explore how the issues are characterized in relationship to notions of risk. Specifically, the authors argue that a “dividing practice” (see Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 49-53) operates in the “Safeguarding Strategy” “with profound implications for how children are governed”: “When they face risks, they are just children, but when they embody risk, they are UASC” (Rigby et al. 2019: 10). Those who “embody risk” are associated with clandestine routes of entry and potential radicalization. In terms of governing, to be labelled “at high risk” compared with others “is to be singled out as requiring expert advice, surveillance and self-regulation” (Lupton 1993: 61 in Rigby et al. 2019: 15).

It is through considerations of risk that care enters the analysis. As Rigby et al. (2019: 12) elaborate: “Within this context of embodied risk, care is arguably constituted inter alia as charity and generosity provided by benevolent British individuals”. Emphasis is placed on one-to-one caring relationships, “on micro levels, rather than on care as a macro social practice with institutional and governing implications”.

To the extent that governmental practices are deemed relevant, care of UASC is constituted a moral responsibility of the Government, rather than a human right. This “call to morality” ascribes “safeguarding UASC” to “voluntary moral norms, rather than to its [the Government’s] formal and legal obligations”. In terms of effects (Question 5 in WPR; seeBacchi WPR CHART),

“Representing the Government’s responsibility on the grounds of morality, rather than on the grounds of human rights and international conventions delimits the question of the obligations towards unaccompanied asylum seeking and refugee children to resettlement.”

It also silences (Question 4 in WPR Bacchi WPR CHART) what happens to the refugees “who will remain unsettled”: “The government’s moral responsibility disappears as soon as the unsettled children are beyond the UK border” (Rigby et al. 2019: 12).

Within these practices, “asymmetrical and hierarchical power relationships are discursively formed between the carer and the beneficiary, the ‘needy’ and those attending to their needs, who are depicted as generous and beneficent” (Rigby et al. 2019: 13). Beasley and I (2007: 293) characterize this relationship as displaying “the residues of noblesse oblige”, effectively denying the socio-political relations that constitute this hierarchy. Rigby et al. (2019: 15 check) drive home the point: “prescriptive understandings of altruism within already hierarchical societies hide alternative, more expansive conceptions of a just and interconnected community, either national or international”. Beasley and I (2007: 279) offer “social flesh” as one such expansive conception, underpinning a profoundly levelling perspective, a radical politics.

The analysis here of how UASC are produced as particular kinds of subjects in the distinction drawn between “legal” and “clandestine” routes of entry maps onto worldwide debates about the legality of adult refugees (Rigby et al. 2019: 13; see Jörgensen 2012, and Wikström and Sténs 2019). In this problematization, care is constituted beneficence, and hence made voluntary and reversible.

In a recognition of social flesh, the shared reliance of embodied humans on social space, infrastructure and resources challenges this characterisation. The “problem” of “care” is recast in ways that raise important questions about the “political responsibility that governments have globally to help this group of children” (Rigby et al. 2019: 15; emphasis added) and other refugees. At a time when governments worldwide are narrowing their purview of political obligations to their “local citizens” (see Gibson and Moran 2020), a call to recognize “social flesh” offers a timely intervention. As Georgia Tacey (Adelaide Advertiser 22 August 2020), consortium director for Save the Children, argues:

‘… if COVID has taught us anything, it’s how interdependent we are on one another both nationally and globally … It’s a false choice to think we can concentrate on Australia’s health. … As our borders will open up sooner rather than later, we need to ensure that the Australian Government continues to strengthen the health systems and livelihoods of other countries.’

REFERENCES

Bacchi, C. 2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be? Frenchs Forest: Pearson Education.

Bacchi, C. & Beasley, C. 2002. Citizen Bodies: is embodied citizenship a contradiction in terms? Critical Social Policy, 22(2): 324-352.

Bacchi, C. & Beasley, C. 2005. The Limits of Trust and Respect: Rethinking Dependency. Social Alternatives, 24(4): 55-61.

Bacchi, C. & Bonham, J. (2014). Reclaiming discursive practices as an analytic focus: Political implications. Foucault Studies, 17 (March): 173-192.

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Beasley, C. & Bacchi, C. 2000. Citizen Bodies: embodying citizens—a feminist analysis. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2(3): 337-358.

Beasley, C. & Bacchi, C. 2005. The Political Limits of “Care” in Re-imagining Interconnection/Community and an Ethical Future. Australian Feminist Studies, 20(46): 49-64.

Beasley, C. & Bacchi, C. 2007. Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity —towards and ethic of “social flesh”. Feminist Theory, 8(3): 279-298.

Beasley, C. & Bacchi, C. 2012. Making politics fleshly: The ethic of social flesh (with Chris Beasley). In A. Bletsas & C. Beasley (Eds.), Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, pp. 141-56.

Eveline, J. and Bacchi, C. 2010. Power, Resistance and Reflexive Practice. In C. Bacchi and J. Eveline (eds) Mainstreaming Politics: Gendering Practices and Feminist Theory. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. pp. 139-161.

Gibson, J. and Moran, A. 2020. As coronavirus spreads, “it’s time to go home” Scott Morrison tells visitors and international students. ABC News, 4 April. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-03/coronavirus-pm-tells-international-students-time-to-go-to-home/12119568

Hacking, I. 2007. “Kinds of People: Moving Targets”. Proceedings of the British Academy 151: 285-318.

Home Office. 2017. Safeguarding Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/656425/UASC_Safeguarding_Strategy_2017.pdf.

Horsell, C. 2020. Problematising Disability: A Critical Policy Analysis of the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme, Australian Social Work, DOI: 10.1080/0312407X.2020.1784969

Jörgensen, M. B. 2012. Legitimizing policies: How policy approaches to irregular migrants are formulated and legitimized in Scandinavia. Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics, 6(2): 46-53.

Keller, R. 2013. Doing Discourse Research: An Introduction for Social Scientists. London: Sage.

Koivunen, A., Kyrölä, K. and Ryberg, I. (Eds) 2018. The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilising affect in feminist, queer and anti-racists media cultures. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Lupton, D. 1993. Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health. International Journal of Health Services, 23(3): 425-435.

McCormack, D. and Salmenniemi, S. 2016. The Biopolitics of Precarity and the Self. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 19(1): 3-15.

Rigby, P., Fotopoulou, M., Rogers, A. Manta & Dikaiou, M. 2019. Problematising separated children: a policy analysis of the UK “Safeguarding Strategy: Unaccompanied asylum seeking and refugee children”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2019.1694407

Wikström, E., and Sténs, A. 2019. Problematising refugee migrants in the Swedish forestry sector, Transfer, 1-18. DOI:10.1177/1024258919827133