Poverty and Emotions

Moving away from the social democratic tradition of the welfare state, anti-poverty policies have been characterized in this century by a renewed attention to the themes of moralization and conditionality. Social policies increasingly involve emotions, alternating feelings of compassion with forms of stigmatization and "aporophobia". These orientations are united by the placing in brackets of any type of relationship that leads to the avoidance of the poor, giving rise to a depolicitation of the discourse. In this scenario, the aim of the lecture is to reconstruct some of the most widespread representations of the poor, exploring the link between these and the following policy orientations: workfare, lunch shaming, hostile architecture, governing by number, eviction and dislocation, neopaternalism, slum tourism.