How governmentality haunts Northeast Brooklyn: The convergence of experimental state practices from welfare to policing.
详细信息
文摘
This thesis is about the securitization of poverty in Northeast Brooklyn, an area with a long history of violence and poverty that grows or persists even when the rest of the city prospers and becomes safer. The Bloomberg administration has attempted to brand New York City as elite, safe and cosmopolitan, and Northeast Brooklyn is a blight in its efforts. I suggest, therefore, that the administration constructs and treats poverty as a neighborhood failure； a failing of individuals within a concentrated and bounded space. This has led certain neighborhoods, including Northeast Brooklyn, to become testing grounds for both experimental welfare programs and policing strategies. Northeast Brooklyn contains two of only six community districts in the city chosen to participate in the controversial three-year pilot initiative Opportunity NYC, the nations first conditional cash transfer CCT) program. The same two districts are part of Operation Impact, a hot-spot policing strategy that floods their streets with new graduates of the New York City Police Departments training academy. These precincts have some of the citys highest rates of police stop-and-searches in the city, and exhibit a sense of constant existential insecurity and unrest. As a result, residents often modify the clothes they wear or the routes or times they walk to avoid police harassment. The behavioral modifications encouraged in different ways through the CCT and Operation Impact can be seen as tactics of self-discipline, which work in accordance with the Bloomberg administrations reformist goals. This thesis analyzes these experimental programs, their histories, and their effects, through the analytical framework of governmentality and of haunting. Using policy and media analysis, an ethnography of Northeast Brooklyn and in-depth interviews with residents, including participants and administrators of the CCT, the thesis shows that it is difficult to differentiate between the effects of poverty policy and securitization, both of which, rather than producing greater security, have produced its opposite&mdash；existential and material insecurity. In sum, Northeast Brooklyn residents are haunted by the securitization of poverty.