The everyday experiences of poverty and marginality: an exploration of shame, stigma and dignity in welfare services

This thesis is an ethnographic look at poverty, marginalisation and unemployment. The research was conducted at a delivery point for material aid, a site called Emergency Relief. Semi-structured interviews, observations of welfare recipients and volunteers, informal conversations and follow-up discussions were conducted to collect data. This method provided analytical chapters about the lived reality of the unemployed, poor or those in desperate need who must collect material aid to survive. Many people are living on the fringe with the bare minimum resources to survive. Meanwhile, they contend with rental costs, evictions, unemployment, family breakdowns and other psychological and substance abuse challenges during this process. In these challenges, many face downward mobility and worse social regulation. This thesis will argue this takes place in neoliberal economies, where labour conditions are precarious, and mutual obligation arrangements for welfare payments benefit the government and employers. It does this in two ways: a neoliberal sensibility about resilience and risk management as individual responsibility is dispersed to recipients, where the individual is trained to think of themselves as the source and reason for their success or failure in the labour market. In doing so, it favours employers with a highly flexible labour market, and workers adapted to precarity, low wages and insecurity as the normalised employment model. The thesis will show this impacts the unemployed differently, as they are not a homogenous group. Mothers and families face unique work and child-caring challenges, and working men meet a downward mobility. Those who can not recalibrate to the social demands become regulated to advanced marginality. People in this social space develop social hierarchies to make sense of this competitive social space. The theories of Michel Foucault are deployed to understand what type of subjectivity is moulded from early forms of welfare and reveal its basis in domination. The theories of Pierre Bourdieu are used to understand state power and what symbolic violence is at play. Then, lastly, the theories of stigma, from Erving Goffman to Imogen Tyler, are deployed to comprehend that stigma is a type of power that can dominate the poor and unemployed, structure realities and build consensus for the authoritarian turn and austerity politics.