Description
Book SynopsisWith a mix of ethnography and social theory, the contributors to
Competing Responsibilities challenge contemporary understandings of responsibility in political, social, and ethical life by showing how neoliberalism's reification of the "responsible subject" masks the myriad forms of individual and collective responsibility that people engage with in their everyday lives.
Trade Review“
Competing Responsibilities makes a valuable theoretical and empirical contribution to social scientific understandings of responsibility at a key moment in the world’s unfolding. . . . This is an accomplished collection with a sustained argument running through it, thus offering substantive and always eloquent interpretations of responsibility and creating a text that has broad-ranging value to the academy and indeed, beyond.” -- Fiona Murphy * Social Anthropology *
"
Competing Responsibilities builds on the centrality of ‘responsibilization’ in neoliberal technologies of governance. . . . This insightful collection will provide food for thought for both researchers and advanced students." -- John Gledhill * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. Competing Responsibilities: Reckoning Personal Responsibility, Care for the Other, and the Social Contract in Contemporary Life / Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle 1
Part I. Theoretical Departures
1. Making Us Resilient: Responsible Citizens for Uncertain Times / Nikolas Rose and Filippa Lentzos 27
2. Attunement: Rethinking Responsibility / Jarrett Zigon 49
Part II. States, Companies, and Communities
3. Reciprocal Responsibilities: Struggles over (New and Old) Social Contracts, Environmental Pollution, and Childhood Asthma in the Czech Republic / Susanna Trnka 71
4. Audit Culture and the Politics of Responsibility: Beyond Neoliberal Responsibilization? / Cris Shore 96
5. From Corporate Social Responsibility to Creating Shared Value: Contesting Responsibilization and the Mining Industry / Jessica M. Smith 118
Part III. Violence
6. "The Information Is Out There": Transparency, Responsibility, and the Missing in Cyprus / Elizabeth Anne Davis 135
7. Justice and Its Doubles: Producing Postwar Responsibilities in Sierra Leone / Rosalind Shaw 156
Part IV. Intimate Ties
8. The Politics of Responsibility in HIV / Barry D. Adam 181
9. Responsibilities of the Third Age and the Intimate Politics of Sociality in Poland / Jessica Robbins-Ruszowski 193
10. Genetic Bystanders: Familial Responsibility and the State's Accountability to Veterans of Nuclear Tests / Catherine Trundle 213
References 233
Contributors 263
Index 267
