Welfare future seminar by Martha Kapazoglou and Vénicia Sananès
To kick off this round of the Welfare Future Seminars, Martha Kapazoglou and Vénicia Sananès (both at the University of Amsterdam) will each give a talk on Tuesday 3 November about their work for the Prototyping Welfare in Europe project.
Martha Kapazoglou’s talk, ‘At the frontline of the state: Negotiating the social contract in Thessaloniki’s municipal food provision services,’ introduces a new way of looking at professionals who provide social services directly to citizens.
Vénicia Sananès’ talk, ‘How to build a society (and other things welfare policy takes for granted),’ takes a critical look at the social foundations that welfare policy often takes for granted.
What
Martha Kapazoglou ‘At the frontline of the state: Negotiating the social contract in Thessaloniki’s municipal food provision services’
Vénicia Sananès ‘How to build a society (and other things welfare policy takes for granted).’
When
3 November, 15.30-17.00, followed by drinks at CREA Café.
Where
REC B5.12, Common Room Anthropology (Roeterseiland, B-building, 5th floor).
If you are not able to join in person, you can also follow the talk and discussion via the live stream (with the option to pose a question in the chat).
The talks
Martha Kapazoglou’s talk ‘At the frontline of the state: Negotiating the social contract in Thessaloniki’s municipal food provision services’ will propose a fresh approach to studying frontline service providers.
Anthropologists increasingly approach fraught encounters at the frontline of local welfare services through the lens of deservingness (Koch 2021; Tošić and Streinzer 2022). They foreground frontline workers’ position as gatekeepers who arbitrate citizens’ access to scarce state resources through moralizing judgements, thereby extending compassion to some, whilst treating others contemptuously. Drawing on 10 months of fieldwork in Thessaloniki’s municipal food provision services, I complicate these insights by ethnographically unpacking frontline workers’ positionality vis-à-vis the Greek state as their employer. I explore how municipal workers got stuck in precarious jobs, left alone to navigate material impoverishment and denigrating working conditions, which rendered them socioeconomically proximate to beneficiaries. This proximity rankled: it generated anxieties over workers’ own déclassement, casting doubt on their status as state representatives. In the face of such disconcerting closeness, often obscured in the deservingness framing, we can understand workers’ animosity as a mechanism of disavowal, aimed at (re-)inscribing firmer boundaries with beneficiaries. Attending to how different subject positions take shape in relation to the state enables me to consider not only the moral, but also the political contestations unfolding in frontline encounters. I focus on beneficiaries’ complaints about the food they received, examining how these generated heated negotiations over the social contract—what the state ought to provide and its responsibilities to poor citizens (Burnyeat and Sheild Johansson 2022). Ultimately, I argue that an anthropology of frontline work can move beyond questions of moral agency and presumed dichotomies between frontline workers and the poor to illuminate how state-citizen relations are negotiated and crafted in everyday welfare encounters.
Vénicia Sananès’ talk ‘How to build a society (and other things welfare policy takes for granted)’ will take a microscope to welfare policy’s taken-for-granted social foundations.
Welfare reform speaks the language of participation, proximity, neighbourliness, self-reliance and community. Residents should help one another. Professionals should work closer to people. Communities should become more resilient. Institutions should rebuild trust. Yet these ambitions quietly presume a social world already capable of carrying them: willing neighbours, active residents, familiar professionals and relationships strong enough to sustain social assistance. In other words, contemporary welfare increasingly relies on a social world it often assumes is already there.
My (upcoming!) PhD dissertation, Under Construction, starts from the opposite end. Based on ethnographic fieldwork across three welfare organisations in Amsterdam, I follow the professionals and volunteers tasked with making these promises work in practice. They search for “good neighbours,” facilitate participation, calibrate vulnerability, recruit familiar faces, coordinate across fragmented organisations, knock on closed doors and occasionally spend an extraordinary amount of time arguing about mugs. These mundane activities reveal a reversal at the heart of contemporary welfare. Rather than society simply providing the social resources on which welfare can draw, welfare professionals increasingly find themselves building, repairing and maintaining the very social world their interventions presuppose. Moving through neighbourly matches, community rooms, meeting tables and doorsteps, this presentation asks what becomes visible when policy ideals such as participation and proximity are treated not as starting conditions, but as practical achievements. If welfare increasingly has to happen through society, who is actually building the society it needs – and how?
Bio's
Martha Kapazoglou is a PhD Researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and part of the research project, Prototyping Welfare in Europe: Experiments in State and Society (PI prof. Anouk de Koning). Her work examines everyday contestations over the Greek state’s role as a welfare provider and struggles to forge alternative sociopolitical visions in Thessaloniki’s field of social provision. Through close ethnographic engagement with municipal social workers and food distributors, NGO professionals, and solidarity volunteers, she explores how frontline actors contend with scarce resources, state promises of improvement, and social movements’ waning momentum. Her research asks: what sociopolitical worlds do these frontline actors craft through the everyday provision of basic services?
Martha holds a BA in Political Science from Davidson College and a RMSc in International Development Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Her master’s thesis examined the social reproduction of Thessaloniki households during the financial crisis. Before starting her PhD, Martha worked for a Dutch NGO in the field of international development.
Vénicia Sananès is an anthropologist and PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam, where she studies efforts to bring social assistance closer to people’s everyday lives in the Netherlands. As part of the project Prototyping Welfare in Europe, she conducts ethnographic research in Amsterdam on policies and practices organised around proximity, participation and mutual support.
As a French researcher in the Netherlands, she enjoys the productive weirdness of being slightly outside the system she studies. This outsider’s eye helps her notice what can seem both completely ordinary and slightly uncanny in Dutch welfare practice: its optimism, informality, and remarkable faith in proximity, participation and self-organisation.
