E06Status and Mobility in Social Assistance

The follow-up project “Status and Mobility in Social Assistance. Human Differentiation in Brazilian Programs of Poverty Reduction” examines forms of human differentiation embedded in state-organized support services and pursues a dual analytical interest: On the one hand, we investigate the status-related effects of welfare-state assistance and ask to what extent participation in aid programs is associated with status passages. On the other hand, we start from the hypothesis that these processes of human differentiation are linked not only to social but also to spatial mobility. 

As a continuation of the subproject “Sorting with Care,” we transfer a research approach previously developed in collaboration with civil society and activist initiatives to bureaucratically administered welfare-state programs. At the same time, we expand this approach by examining the interferences between formal regimes of classification—such as legally codified categories of need—and informal, situationally produced forms of (self-)differentiation and differentiation by others. We thus understand social programs as institutional contact zones in which different orders of knowledge, normative expectations, and moral attributions intersect.

Our ethnographic research focuses on two cities in Brazilian border regions, Belém and Porto Alegre, where intra-urban, regional, and international mobility are intertwined with social policy measures in particularly pronounced ways. In these contexts, we analyze how aid-related distinctions emerge at the intersection of migration, border regimes, and socioeconomic inequality.

How do we work?
 In order to capture both institutional consolidations and situational shifts in human differentiation, we focus on several interrelated levels of analysis. First, we reconstruct the historical formation of poverty- and need-related categories within the context of Brazilian social policies and their administrative translations. Second, we analyze the (self-)positioning of staff members within bureaucratic structures, for example in the interplay of professional ethics, political conjunctures, moral horizons of expectation, and affectively charged social interactions. Third, we examine the classifications by others and the self-classifications of benefit recipients in concrete encounters with bureaucracy. In these interactions, claims to support are negotiated not only along lines such as income, citizenship, racialization, family constellation, gender, or dimensions of (im)mobility, but also through performative-affective markers such as willingness to cooperate, civic conduct, or gratitude.