Presentatie Griet Roets

1. Roundtable 16-17 March 2011 Interuniversity international FrancquiChair Prof. Dr. Gert Biesta PawnsorPioneers?Putting povertyinto a melting pot of experiences Griet Roets, postdoctoralresearcher (FWO), Department of Social Welfare Studies, GhentUniversityRudi Roose, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Welfare Studies, GhentUniversity/Associate Professor, Department of Criminology, Free University of Brussels

2. Basedon Roets, G., Roose, R., Bouverne-De Bie, M., Claes, L., Van Hove, G. PawnsorPioneers? Employingpeoplewithexperience of poverty as experts in public services Submitted to CriticalSocialPolicy

3. In a nutshell

4. Context widespread international interest in putting people with experience of poverty in participatory positions as co-workers in order to design, implement and monitor anti-poverty strategies for organisations, public services and policy units (Beresford, 2002; Cook, 2002) discussing background developments and findings acquired for a recent research project into public services in Belgium: this innovative project runs from September 2005 until 2011, integrally funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) (see POD MI, 2006; Casmanet al., 2010)

5. Pawns… orpioneers? analysing the enacted logic of participation in federal public services identifying fundamental risks and challenges if individuals with experience of poverty are employed as poverty experts in order to enable public services to adopt an anti-poverty perspective: pawns or pioneers?

9. …as employees people with experience of poverty are mobilised under the condition that these public services first explicitly subscribe to anti-poverty politics implementation of an anti-poverty perspective is set as a mission statement and a collective concern involves questioning structural dynamics of social exclusion dynamic in which experience of poverty is valuable in the collective participation takes place within “policy making spaces”: the poverty problem is translated as a public issue the collective might learn how to share power in the identification and construction of problems, for example problems associated with poverty, and in stipulating joint action

14. Issues to consider

15. How to understand and theorise processes and practices of civic learning? Civiclearning as… an individual outcome according to a pre-structured norm of acquiring ‘poverty expertise’ an individual as well as collective process, open and undetermined, as an inherent dimension of the ongoing experiment with democratic projects and politics

16. …an individualoutcome an individual outcome of learning: the ultimate goal for poor and socially excluded people is to become “good citizens’ who need to connect individually with social standards, mainly on behalf of economic interests starts from the assumption that political identities are formed and have to be formed before the ‘event’ of democratic politics: those who wish to take part in the ‘game’ need to meet certain entry conditions (see The Missing Link)

17. …an individualoutcome inscribing politics of recognition/identity politics (Fraser): a political subject “is not a group that ‘becomes aware’ of itself, finds its voice, imposes its weight on society”, because establishing oneself as a subject does “not happen before the ‘act’ of politics but rather in and through it” (Rancière) a civilisation strategy (‘good’ citizens): identification with the social and political order in order to reproduce it: socialization conception of citizenship/political identity

18. …an individual as well as collectiveprocess both individual and collective processes of learning: democracy always requires the translation and transformation of private troubles into public issues (Wright Mills) the ‘them’ is no longer perceived and approached as an enemy to be destructed, but as an adversary(Mouffe): shift from antagonism into agonism

19. …an individual as well as collectiveprocess politics of recognition and redistribution of both power and material resources (Fraser): collective dis-identification with the social order as democratic subjectivity is engendered through engagement in an always undetermined experiment: subjectification conception of citizenship/political subjectivity subjectification “redefines the field of experience that gave to each their identity with their lot”; as it “decomposes and recomposes the relationships between the ways of doing, of being and of saying that define the perceptible organization of the community” (Rancière)