Noting the pervasiveness of the adoption of "responsibility" as a core ideal of neoliberal governance, the contributors to Competing Responsibilities challenge contemporary understandings and critiques of that concept in political, social, and ethical life. They reveal that neoliberalism's reification of the responsible subject masks the myriad forms of individual and collective responsibility that people engage with in their everyday lives, from accountability, self-sufficiency, and prudence to care, obligation, and culpability. The essays-which combine social theory with ethnographic research from Europe, North America, Africa, and New Zealand-address a wide range of topics, including critiques of corporate social responsibility practices; the relationships between public and private responsibilities in the context of state violence; the tension between calls on individuals and imperatives to groups to prevent the transmission of HIV; audit culture; and how health is cast as a citizenship issue. Competing Responsibilities allows for the examination of modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or coexist with the neoliberal focus on the individual cultivation of the self.

Contributors
Barry D. Adam, Elizabeth Anne Davis, Filippa Lentzos, Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski, Nikolas Rose, Rosalind Shaw, Cris Shore, Jessica M. Smith, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle, Jarrett Zigon

About the Author
Susanna Trnka is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and coeditor of Senses and Citizenships: Embodying Political Life.

Catherine Trundle is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington and coeditor of Detachment: Essays on the Limits of Relational Thinking.

Reviews
"Competing Responsibilities makes a valuable theoretical and empirical contribution to social scientific understandings of responsibility at a key moment in the world's unfolding. . . . This is an accomplished collection with a sustained argument running through it, thus offering substantive and always eloquent interpretations of responsibility and creating a text that has broad-ranging value to the academy and indeed, beyond." -- Fiona Murphy * Social Anthropology *
"Competing Responsibilities builds on the centrality of 'responsibilization' in neoliberal technologies of governance. . . . This insightful collection will provide food for thought for both researchers and advanced students." -- John Gledhill * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822363750
Author Susanna Trnka
Format Paperback
Page Count 280
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 386g