Gretchen Purser

The Circle of Dispossession: Evicting the Urban Poor in Baltimore

Although tenant evictions are routine in impoverished urban communities throughout the USA, scholars of housing and urban poverty have consistently overlooked this social problem. Drawing predominantly upon participant observation on eviction crews in Baltimore, this study examines the social drama of eviction, focusing upon the orchestration and execution of the court-ordered physical removal of tenants and their property. I find that property managers delegate the ‘dirty work’ of dispossession to a dispossessed population and that laborers on eviction crews tend to differentiate and distance themselves from the people they are evicting, adopting the dominant belief that eviction is rooted in the individual, moral deficiencies of the tenant. These findings reveal that those who are excluded from the American ‘paradigm of propertied citizenship’ – the homeless – are used to enforce, and serve to legitimate, that very paradigm. I argue that evictions entail a circle of dispossession, reproduced both materially and ideologically.

Jobless and Godless: Religious neoliberalism and the project of evangelizing employability in the US The authors contributed equally to the research for and writing of this article.

In the wake of welfare reform, there has been growing scholarly attention to ‘religious neoliberalism’ and, specifically, to the practices and politics of faith-based organizations in neoliberalized landscapes of social service provision. While much of this scholarship has suggested a seamless ‘fusion’ between conservative evangelicalism and neoliberal ideology, ethnographic research has tended to reveal the far more complicated, and contradictory, reality of evangelical social projects as they play out on the ground. Presenting the first in-depth ethnography of a faith-based job-readiness program, this article examines the contradictory logics operative within the project of what we call ‘evangelizing employability.’ Targeting joblessness, the program urges entrepreneurial independence. Targeting godlessness, the program urges righteous dependence on God. The project of evangelizing employability reveals the extraordinary utility of religion for the enactment of neoliberal priorities and policies of work enforcement and contributes to our understanding of religious neoliberalism and its class-based contradictions.

Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston

and believe in what they are doing. Furthermore, the book is written with a light touch and makes for a fun read. But when all is said and done, what the book achieves overall is admit us to the experiments in performance of two interesting academics, who, on their part, see connections between their admittedly unprofessional forays into selfexpression before audiences and the advancement of science. It was interesting to get to know them as they perform themselves in writing. Their passion for artistic performances as devices for reaching professional and non-professional audiences is, furthermore, impressive as a set of sophisticated devices to enhance social science education. As described in the book, which is written as a complicated duet with occasional solos, the Gergens’ passion will undoubtedly inspire others. It is possible, too, that if they allow themselves to perform, and even to fail as performers, some of those other social scientists will hit upon new insights. Perhaps, in turn, they will ultimately be able to show more clearly why amateurs playing at and even in art are contributing to either social change or scientific progress, or both!