Black women under state : surveillance, poverty, & the violence of social assistance / Idil Abdillahi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Abdillahi, Idil, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women, Black--Ontario--Toronto--Social conditions--Case studies.

Women, Black.

Welfare recipients--Ontario--Toronto--Case studies.

Welfare recipients.

Welfare recipients--Ontario--Toronto--Social conditions--Case studies.

Public welfare--Ontario.

Public welfare.

Women, Black--Civil rights--Ontario.

Welfare recipients--Civil rights--Ontario.

Privacy, Right of--Ontario.

Privacy, Right of.

Welfare recipients--Civil rights.

Welfare recipients--Social conditions.

Women, Black--Civil rights.

Women, Black--Social conditions.

Ontario.

Ontario--Toronto.

Genre:

Case studies.

Physical Description:

229 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Winnipeg : ARP Books, [2022]

Summary:

"The lives and conditions of Black women are inseparable from, and inextricably linked to, all dimensions of social and political life. Black Women Under State centres on the realities of Black women, both in-process and theory, who are living at the intersections of race, poverty, surveillance, and social services. Abdillahi, who is uniquely positioned as a community organizer, practitioner, public intellectual, and scholar, engaged twenty women living at these life intersections in the greater Toronto area. The text undertakes a deep and studied inquiry into these women's subjective experiences of surveillance while on the province of Ontario's social assistance program Ontario Works and interrogates the dimensional effects of those experiences. Offering a timely and crucial contribution to the discourse around abolition, Abdillahi makes explicit the ways in which social systems are made opaque so that we don't connect them to the carceral state; this concept of carceral care talks to abolition as the broad concept that it is a fully-embraced understanding that abolition dismantles systems of policing that extend beyond the institution we call the police. Three major themes emerge through her inquiry: surveillance, poverty, and morality each interconnected to a larger social and public policy discourse. Abdillahi employs Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist Thought as primary theoretical lenses as she animates the lives of these women, alongside and in conversation with existing research, theory and practice, revealing direct links among their experience, in order to demonstrate the shared, longstanding, and ongoing historicity of the interconnectedness of Black women's experience globally. Through a dynamic interlacing of contemporary critical thought and lived experience, Black Women Under State contributes to filling a gap in social policy literature, which has typically disregarded the subjective experiences of Black women or treated them as a mere addendum."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The studied Black woman

The welfare cheat and situating work

Where surveillance takes and leaves us

Illusory solidarity in a surveilled city

Mapping a legal regime of "public safety"

The monitoring state

What public?

The case worker

Poverty and BlackLife

Searching and researching

Stripping, vibes, frequencies, "strange sentences"

The glass frame

Index

References

Acknowledgements.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [207]-227) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Abdillahi, Idil. Black women under state.

ISBN:

9781927886588

1927886589

OCLC:

1267687419

Publisher Number:

99994084065