“Protection by Patchwork: Rethinking Frames in the Politics of Distribution”

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Meredith McLaughlin is a sociocultural anthropologist with research interests in social protection, policy futures, and decolonial thought. Her research and teaching explore the ethical dilemmas posed by redistributive politics. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the social life of welfare in rural India and is currently researching experiments in guaranteed income in the United States. Meredith received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at Yale University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pitzer College.

In post-liberalization India, a broad range of programs providing public goods and individual subsidies unsettle distinctions between public and private, welfare and development. They also have distinctive moral logics, temporalities, and local variations. In this talk, She traces how rural claimants in North India traverse the interstices that emerge between programs and construct a patchwork of social protection from available resources. She argues that these strategies of subsistence can constructively expand the frames through which we understand the politics and ethics of distribution. More broadly, she offers a critique of epistemic genres in the study of social protection and shows how a reframing of global knowledge production helps to situate new experiments in social policy.