For Love of Money: Rewards of Care for India’s Women Community Health Workers

What are the rewards of paid care work for frontline health workers? I focus on India’s women community health volunteers, the largest such workforce in the world. Appointed since 2007 and numbering one million, these women are paid per-case incentives to connect the poor and marginalized to government-run health services. Using 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi and Punjab, including 80 interviews, I find that women community health volunteers (called Accredited Social Health Activists or ASHAs) experience extrinsic rewards in paid care work. ASHAs earn not only from their official wages, but also from two unofficial streams: a) a boost of income from non-ASHA work and b) commissions from private hospitals. I also find that the intrinsic rewards ASHAs report—emotional gratification, relative autonomy, and skill-building—are co-constituted with extrinsic rewards; that is, they are tied to their earnings. This calls into question the “Love versus Money” binary, used to frame much of the discussion on care work. I argue instead for a “Love of Money” framing—that is, money as a reward and money as begetting other rewards. My findings highlight the significance of globalizing the empirical research on paid care work.

Divergent Residential Pathways from Flood-Prone Areas: How Neighborhood Inequalities Are Shaping Urban Climate Adaptation

Flood risks are rising across the United States, putting the economic and social values of growing numbers of homes at risk. In response, the federal government is funding the purchase and demolition of housing in areas of greatest jeopardy, tacitly promoting residential resettlement as a strategy of climate adaptation, especially in cities. Despite these developments little is known about where people move when they engage in such resettlement or how answers to that question vary by the racial and economic status of their flood-prone neighborhoods. The present study begins to fill that gap. We introduce a new typology for classifying environmental resettlement along two socio-spatial dimensions of community attachment: (a) distance moved from one’s flood-prone home; and (b) average distance resettled from similarly relocated neighbors. Next, we analyze data from 1,572 homeowners who accepted government-funded buyouts across 39 neighborhood areas in Harris County, Texas – Houston’s urban core. Results indicate that homeowners from more privileged neighborhoods resettle closer to their flood-prone homes and to one another, thus helping to preserve the social and economic value of their homes; homeowners from less privileged areas end up farther away from both. Implications for understanding social inequities in government-funded urban climate adaptation are discussed.

Slow Violence and the Gas Peedit in Neoliberal India

This article analyzes the ways in which slow violence and neoliberalism intertwine in the production of social and environmental destruction, evident in the lingering devastation from the 1984 Union Carbide catastrophe in Bhopal, India. Children are born with congenital abnormalities; women are plagued with reproductive health problems; and dangerous chemicals left in the abandoned factory continue to contaminate soil and groundwater. Yet Bhopal is remembered almost exclusively for the spectacle of its immediate aftermath. Drawing on 60 interviews with Bhopal victims and activists, field observations, archives, and official and independent reports, this paper examines how the neoliberal turn in Indian governance plays a role in the creation of slow violence. The paper advances our understanding of socioenvironmental destruction by tying slow violence to a temporal change in countries' governance in the Global South. The paper underscores the significance of considering political economic dynamics in the perpetration of slow violence. It also emphasizes how the neoliberal turn, now anchored in right-wing Hindutva politics in India, further constrains the possibilities for counter-measures that would address slow violence. The paper offers significant implications for analyzing the political economy of socioenvironmental and health disparities in the wake of corporate malfeasance.

Training for War: Academy Socialization and Warrior Policing

The role of the police in the United States is a topic of contentious debate. Central to this debate is a binary that constructs police officers as fulfilling either a protective, community-serving role, or an aggressive, crime-fighting role. The most recent iteration is reflected in the warrior-guardian construct, which conceptualizes officers as both initiators of, and defenders against, violence. This article examines how the warrior-guardian framework shapes police training, and highlights how this construct is itself gendered and racialized. I draw on one year of ethnographic field work at four police academies and 40 interviews with police officers and cadets to argue that police training is an organized effort to condition officers to conceptualize their relationship with the public as a war. Three components constitute this framing: (1) instructors construct an evil, unpredictable enemy; (2) cadets are taught to identify their enemy in gendered and racialized ways; and (3) cadets are encouraged to adopt a warrior mentality. I show that cadets are taught to view the world in a way that pits them against an enemy, pushes them to conceptualize their enemy as a man of color, and to think about violence as a moral necessity.

Not Seeing Like a State: Mandated Reporting, State-Adjacent Actors and the Production of Illegible Subjects

Previous scholarship has described how the state “sees” subjects and is itself seen, but has not adequately considered the unfolding interactional dynamics through which subjects become legible or not. This article devises an analytical approach to the micro-dynamics of legibility. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data from violence prevention programs in Los Angeles high schools, the author examines the street-level enactment of third-party mandated reporting, which tasks state-adjacent actors with reporting when a student discloses harm. While the delegation of reporting broadens the state’s horizon of visibility, it also disrupts taken for granted mechanisms of state legibility and perception. This study maps a sequence of micro-level dynamics through which illegible subjects are produced. First, third-party mandated reporters distanced themselves from the visible marks of the state in interactions with young people and presented themselves using markers of interpersonal connection. Second, students applied pre-existing situational definitions of interactions with non-state adults, opening up space for accounts of harm to emerge. Finally, facilitators produced illegibility as they discouraged young people from engagement with the state and trained them in interactional strategies of vagueness and de-personalization to make their harm illegible to policy mechanisms.