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RGS-IBG 2018 CFP: (Im)moral bureaucracies and welfare encounters? Session convenors: Jon May (Queen Mary University of London) Andrew Williams (Cardiff University) Paul Cloke (University of Exeter) Liev Cherry (Queen Mary University of London) Recent years have seen a renewed interest in institutional ethnography as a means of examining the moral and political logics constructed in a variety of both state and non-state institutions (Billo and Mountz, 2016; Jones, 2012), and the bureaucratic technologies through which these logics are performed (Gill, 2016). Though much of this work has been focused on spaces of welfare, it has tended thus far to focus mainly on voluntary welfare setting (Williams et al, 2016), with less attention paid to other forms of welfare delivery. Within a context where the British welfare state has been increasingly out-sourced to a variety of private companies as well as not-for-profit organisations, the increasingly complex constitution of the ‘welfare state’ raises questions about the perhaps equally varied bureaucratic forms and encounters characterising different elements of it. Such differences might relate to differences in the aims and ethos of state, for profit and not-for-profit agencies; in the actors involved (whether civil servants, private employees, or charitable workers/volunteers); in the technologies through which encounters are enacted (paper based vouchers, on-line submissions, telephone or face-to-face interviews); and/or to the organisational structures (and space for discretion) characterising different agencies. Consideration of these differences, and their relationship one to another, may usefully encourage a re-examination of the moral and political qualities of welfare encounters (as care-full, and/or controlling, for example), and of the ‘bureaucratic form’ (as necessarily dehumanising, and/or as enlightened ‘blind justice’) itself. This session invites papers to consider the political and ethical logics and practices of bureaucratic encounters in a variety of welfare (and related) settings. Whilst we welcome papers which address any of the following themes, we would be happy to discuss submissions which move beyond these: - Approaches to institutional ethnography - The moral and political dimensions of the bureaucratic form and/or welfare encounters - Street level bureaucrats - Bureaucratic technologies and moral distancing - Normative orders embedded in welfare bureaucracies, including the discursive practices of class, gender and racialised differences Please email abstracts (300w) to Jon May ([log in to unmask]) and Andrew Williams ([log in to unmask]) by the deadline of 2nd February 2018 References Billo, E. and Mountz, A. (2015) For institutional ethnography: Geographical approaches to institutions and the everyday, Progress in Human Geography 40 (2): 199-220 Gill, N. (2016) Nothing Personal: Geographies of governing and activism in the British asylum system: London, RGS-IBG/Wiley Blackwell. Jones, R. (2012) State encounters, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30: 805 – 821 Williams, A., Cloke, P. and May, J. and Goodwin M (2016) Contested space: The contradictory political dynamics of food banking in the UK. Environment and Planning A 48(11): 2291–2316