Competing Responsibilities

"This volume's concern with responsibility captures a range of facets of neoliberal policies in a focused and novel way. An absorbing and compelling read, Competing Responsibilities makes an original contribution to the continuing delineation of neoliberal policy and practice as the subject and grounding of contemporary anthropological research." - George E. Marcus, coauthor of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

"At this moment, when the concept of responsibility seems irretrievably tarnished by its long association with neoliberalism and individualistic ideals of 'personal responsibility,' these essays offer surprising evidence that 'responsibility' is being reactivated and reimagined around the globe for collective life, for caring and social inclusion, and world-building. Together, the essays attest to the importance of contesting 'responsibility,' rather than abandoning the concept, by combining theoretical, ethnographic, and political research that wrestles 'responsibility' out of its moribund association with neoliberalism and back into the lifeblood of public life." - Barbara Cruikshank, author of The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects

“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