TS: Could you both introduce yourselves, and talk about how you came around to the question of responsibility?

ST: I’d been doing work in the Czech Republic, looking at kids and asthma and comparing what I found there to responses to childhood asthma in New Zealand, and I was quite stunned by the different approaches in these two countries, in terms of their very different ideas about the roles of individuals and the family in trying to cope with a chronic condition. In New Zealand, it’s very much about self-management, while in the Czech Republic it’s focused on medical and other forms of scientific expertise. Obviously I was very much influenced by the work of Nick Rose on “responsibilization” as a way of both understanding mundane, everyday behavior and the larger political forces behind it. But I also started to see that when you begin to unpack the category of ‘care’ – even with respect to a narrowly defined set of care practices, in this case all related to childhood asthma – you can discover a whole range of various modes of responsibility, from responibilization to corporate social responsibility to kinship, and that got me thinking about how we might theoretically come to discuss such competing modes of responsibility in more productive ways.

CT: I came to it looking at a group of New Zealand and British veterans who were involved in nuclear tests in the Pacific, and I anticipated that they would be using the language of rights to talk about their desire to get health care. And in fact, what I found was that it was entirely infused with the language of responsibility and state responsibility and, in contrast, the state trying to ensure that these men took a position of self-responsibility in accounting for their own health, and saying it wasn’t about radiation, it was about their lifestyle habits: diet, smoking etc. So like Susanna, my research had some interesting contrasts between broader social responsibility and individual responsibility, and we started talking about this and saw some interesting parallels. We realized that the concept of “care” has been very carefully unpacked in anthropology but the word “responsibility” hadn’t received the same treatment, and we think it deserves the same kind of interrogation and critique. And as Susanna said, the idea of “responsibilization” is being carefully thought out, but its links to other styles of responsibility less so.

ST: One of the things we talked about in the piece we wrote (Trnka and Trundle 2014) was about how we feel ‘responsibility’ has been colonized by individual responsibilization in political rhetoric. We see it in so many examples around the world, and certainly in New Zealand. For instance, last year, one of my children who was in Intermediate School and was then 13 years old, came home with the news that “responsibility” was the theme for their Social Studies course for an entire school term. But all they talked about during the term was individual responsibility, self-management, and how to improve one-self – they didn’t consider ‘responsibility’ in terms of community responsibility, responsibility to the environment, or their relationships to one another in terms of being collectively responsible as a class, or as young people in New Zealand. Her sense of what they were supposed to learn was the idea that learning to be responsible is all about learning how to be responsible for yourself.

CT: As another example, Susanna, you’ve received flyers in your mailbox that talk about ‘responsible pet ownership.’

ST: Yes, I am now “a responsible dog owner!” In New Zealand, as of two years ago you can be officially registered “responsible dog owner” as opposed to a normal dog owner if you pass a certain course that ensures you know how to take adequate care of your dog. (And as a consequence, your licensing fees are lower). “Responsibility” is thus increasingly permeating into everyday language but primarily – and this is key – through the rhetoric of responsibilization. One of the things that Catherine and I are trying to do is show how unsettling, and dangerous, it is to have “responsibility” become so restricted to such individual-focused forms of “responsibilization.”

TS: Is that what “responsibilization” means? It refers to making individuals responsible for themselves or their own conduct?

CT: It speaks to the language of empowerment very strongly, and autonomy. Whether that’s an individual responsible for her own conduct or whether that’s a parent for a child, a boss for his worker, trying to instill an ethos of self-empowerment.

ST: It’s about self-autonomy and self-reliance.

TS: You referred to Nikolas Rose. His arguments about “responsibilization” have been really important and original and have helped us understand trends in healthcare and politics and so on. So, if you were going to take a snapshot of that idea, that trend, that concept, what does that mean?

ST: I think it refers to divesting or redistributing responsibility from a broader array of sets of obligations and reciprocities to focus it on the individual. So, one of the examples I particularly like, or dislike, was the one in Wellington, where the pedestrian lane has been changed. It’s no longer pedestrian-only, as they now allow buses on it. Of course, when you make a change like that, it takes people a while to adjust because they have a habit of walking across the road without worrying about buses. And so a dozen people, who have been injured or died from walking into the bus lane —

CT: One of those injured was, ironically, the Director of NZ Bus.

ST: So there’s been a public call to respond to this, people demanding not to get rid of the bus lane but something much less costly, namely putting up markers or barriers so people don’t just wander into the bus lane without realizing it. And in response to this the deputy mayor of Wellington said—

CT: He deemphasized the issue of political responsibility, and talked about safety as “a partnership” between “those people who drive on the roads and the pedestrians who cross those roads”, and a Council report on the accidents found that pedestrians were “largely to blame”.

TS: Right, “they need to look after themselves.” I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I have a Google News alert on pedestrian deaths. I’m a big walker, and it’s something I’m obsessed with. Whenever I get a report on a pedestrian death, I put it up on Twitter, “pedestrian killed,” and unfortunately there’s a lot of them. But there’s a new kind of pedestrian activism all over the world. There’s pro-bike activism, but there is also a new focus on pedestrians — or rather, simply people who walk.

ST: We could think about it as another type of responsibility, namely the kind of activism that is demanding that governments and states and local councils take some responsibility for making spaces safe. These are precisely the sorts of tensions and nuances of responsibility that we’re interested in drawing out.

TS: So I think that story’s pretty familiar to a lot of people. When you talk about “competing responsibilities,” what does that capture, or what do you put forward with that idea?

CT: We want to look at the cross-cutting and contrasting types of responsibilities that exist in the different layers of social practice. Some which are very contrasting with some of those dominant neoliberal modes of responsibility, and some are quite aligned and complementary with it. It’s certainly not our idea to take other types of obligations beyond responsibilization, whether they be care or ideas of the social contract, and say that they are the antithesis of or the cure for neo-liberal notions of responsibilities. But we want to show there are a range of ways in which responsibilities get enacted today in a range of contexts, with different moral valences and which enable diverse types of relationships.

ST: I think if you speak with people about responsibility, you won’t get a response that just focuses on responsibilization. Ordinary people have a sense of being enmeshed in all sorts of different kinds of relationships, so that’s what we tried to capture with the idea of competing responsibilities. At times you might be pulled in different directions, at times these different kinds of responsibilities might actually align, but the idea is that there’s a multiplicity of ways you are responsible to yourself, to others, to the environment, to your family, to your community, to your workplace, to the state – as well as a whole myriad of expectations you have that others will act responsibly towards you – that really supersede the way responsibility is being politically redefined.

TS: [Redefined] In neoliberal discourse—

CT: Also we are interested in the ways people respond to the drive for responsibilization, sometimes by purposeful acts of ‘irresponsiblization’ or by demanding others take responsibility. People can have a range of reasons to resist calls to become empowered and personally responsibilized. These types of subjectivities can be a burden in certain contexts. Other times, they can be very enabling. So we are seeking to not just look at different types of responsibilities, but the ways that people respond to calls to be responsible.

TS: I think we talked about this at length earlier — the idea that there is a tension between emergent notions we have about complex systems, and ideas about complexity and enmeshedness, and at the same time, this profound discourse of responsibility, of personal or individual responsibility. Rose talks about that a little bit — where he talks about criminal culpability and notions of genetic determinants of behavior, notions that are orthogonal to the idea of personal responsibility, where one might invoke a phrase like, “maybe I have maladaptive genes”— that kind of thing.

CT: His work sometimes gets simplified down by scholars to say “it’s all about self-responsibility,” but he’s much more nuanced. Genetics implies a whole set of relationships you can’t get away from, and which can become more important, or important in new ways to one’s sense of self and obligations to others. So he does talk about the forms of, for example, pastoral care that develop between genetic counselors and patients, and the way in which family members have to think responsibly for kin, in the present and in an imagined future, and the wide ranging obligations, choices, decisions and demands that come with this. Empowerment is certainly a part of it, he shows, but within more complex contexts of competing responsibilities.

ST: I think what we’re trying to do is to make sure the word “responsibility” stays there and in its broader sense, and so it is important to talk about these other entanglements, dependencies, and obligations as responsibility. And in order to try and encourage people to look at responsibility in all its variations and guises, what we’ve tried to do is suggest two arenas—one is care and the other one is social contracts and ideologies—where a range of different ideas and practices of reciprocity, obligation, and duty get played out.

TS: In that light, then, what is your hope for this conference that you’re organizing in August? August 15?

ST: August 15-17, in Wellington, New Zealand.

TS: What is the conference about? What are you hoping to see there?

ST: We’re trying to “open up” our understandings of responsibility in the 21st century. We hope to do this both in terms of looking ethnographically at the diverse ways that people enact responsibility (or fail to enact it) as well as to then critically look at such responsibility practices in terms of where they fit historically and politically and what they tell us about contemporary social forms.

CT: We’re hoping to get a widely diverse set of case studies: mundane, quotidian forms, corporate and social responsibility, issues of culpability and blame at the national level, philosophical discussions of responsibility. So we’re hoping that in drawing together those diverse ethnographic angles we’ll be able to theoretically and analytically develop and extend this as an anthropological concept.

ST: And show how it’s useful for critical analysis, and why it might be politically important to try and not necessarily reclaim the term ‘responsibility’ but provoke more the debate over its current usage: to create debate around the question “what is responsibility?” so it doesn’t de facto become responsibilization. And I think another key thing about the conference is that we want it to be interdisciplinary so we can bring together a range of the different angles. It won’t be just anthropology, but much broader.

TS: There’s one thing we didn’t discuss yet and that’s the notion of ethnographic responsibility. I’m curious, is that a dimension and a kind of anthropological responsibility that you’d like to examine?

ST: Absolutely. I wrote about this topic in a book with Cris Shore called Up Close and Personal (2013, Berghahn Books) which is about the production of ethnographic knowledge and pulls together a diverse group of anthropologists who to talk about their experiences in the field, in academia more broadly, and in the wider community. One of the things they discuss in relation to anthropological practice is
the responsibilities of the ethnographers to their interlocutors, but also, the responsibilities of our interlocutors back to us? Because at the end of the day we’re all human beings engaged in relationships that are based on forms of reciprocity. Of course you take on a different kind of responsibility if you’re writing about people and publishing what you learn from your interactions with them, but those sort of human interactions supersede the goal of producing some sort of ethnographic work. They are important in their own right, and need to be considered as such. That’s something Catherine and I didn’t explore in our paper — simply because we kind of needed to narrow it a little bit! — but it’s certainly something we would like to see explored in the conference.

CT: We’re not just thinking uncritically about responsibility as an all-liberating concept, because responsibility can get invoked within fieldwork settings in ways that perhaps elide the complexity of what’s going on. I’m thinking about the way the word “engagement” has become one of those tropes that is seen as a social good in fieldwork. Another recent project of mine has been an edited book with Matei Candea, Joanna Cook and Thomas Yarrow in the UK on the idea of detachment (Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking, Manchester University Press, forthcoming), which in part seeks to question the often thinly interrogated trope of engagement within anthropology. I think in the same way we need to think hard about what calls for responsibility mean in fieldwork and not necessarily see it as something we simply need more of, but look at all the different shades and consequences of its enactment.
ST: For example, if you look at Annemarie Mol’s work on ‘care’ — that’s very much in line with what we’re trying to do there, to take a concept and inquire about how it’s used ethnographically, but also in terms of critical analysis and in doing so hopefully come up with a sharper conception of what we mean by responsibility, much in the same way that she did for ‘care.’

CT: And in the way she contrasted it with notions of citizenship and notions of choice—we were also trying to compare and contrast with other useful concepts to see how responsibility enables other words.

TS: Why is New Zealand an interesting place to do this work?

CT: Being a small country, in which the competitive market model doesn’t necessarily work well to solve certain social problems, there is a very strong historical legacy of the engaged state. At the same time we led the world in embracing a very strongly neoliberal vision in the 1980s, which really transformed society on many levels. So there is a unique and sometimes tense mixture of responsibilities at play here, between individual empowerment and the social contract. And the other interesting factor in New Zealand is that there is the actively ongoing, contested, and sometimes contentious issue of responsibility between the Māori indigenous population and the Crown, the state. There exists a treaty, the Treaty of Waitangi, a social contract that is unique in many ways internationally in the way in which it allows a political debate about responsibility to occur at the national level based on ethnicity, historical injustice, law and state responsibility. So I think that is also an interesting feature of New Zealand life when talking about responsibility.

TS: And the two keynotes who will be at the conference — Cris Shore is a keynote, and he’s done work on accountability and so on, and obviously Nikolas Rose has worked in this area, so clearly there’s an important conversation occurring between their work.

ST: Through his work on the anthropology of policy and ‘audit culture’, Cris has come at this in quite a different angle, looking at how techniques of modern management and financial accounting are being used as instruments of responsibilisation and to govern people at a distance. They might appear apolitical — ‘it’s just a routine measure of performance’, that kind of thing — yet those sorts of moves toward neo-liberalizing society (which we were discussing above) are being promoted precisely through such different modes of accountability and auditing. Much of his work has sought to understand the various ways in which these policy processes create new categories of persons by operating as technologies of the self that produce responsible – and responsibilized – subjects.

These will be some of the key themes we hope will be picked up in the conference, through a range of perspectives and disciplinary approaches that will, we hope, both build and deviate in interesting ways from the idea presented in the two key notes.

In New Zealand, student debt is a pervasive and powerful feature of student life. Neoliberal user-pay ideologies led to the introduction of tuition fees in 1989 and the formation of the Student Loan Scheme in 1992. Through the scheme many New Zealand students have become increasingly indebted to the government in the form of financial loans. As of June 2012, 701,000 people had a student loan with Inland Revenue and the nominal value of loan balances was almost $13 billion (MoE 2012). My own loan balance sits at $33,515.08 which is just above average for postgraduate students.

The prevalence of student loans and the massive amount of debt owed by students in New Zealand has directly influenced student activism, but has also affected participation indirectly because of its influence on the priorities, energy and time students have had. It seems that, that which could potentially inspire students to action often discourages them.

One way student debt effects activism is by influencing student’s priorities. Due to debt, most students take on part-time work, which on top of assignments, revision, lectures, and tutorials, does not leave students with much spare time. Additionally, when students do have free time, they are more likely to spend it doing activities and joining clubs which will benefit their résumé, a result of the anxiety surrounding their debt. As Paul Comrie-Thomson (2010) points out “a prospective employer is going to be considerably more inclined to take on a member of the debating club than say a member of the University’s Marxist community”. Zoe Zuccotti, a student activist herself, echoes Comrie-Thomson’s idea, explaining the conflicting features of contemporary student life:

[we’re] now fee paying students and … most of us have part time jobs [but] we’re still fucking poor… It’s really hard to have no time because you are working, and you’re paying a shit load of money to be here so you wanna get the most out of it, but you’re also conscious of tens of thousands of dollars of debt, you know, so you wanna get through it quickly. And you’re still poor which is inherently kind of like a factor against taking action because you’re focused on survival, and you’re energy is really precious resource (Zuccotti in Russell 2013).

Studying these experiences and the larger social matrix they are embedded in demonstrates that debt is a violent feature of the contemporary University.

Violence operates along a continuum that spans structural, symbolic, and every day dimensions. Structural Violence refers to the political-economic organization of society that imposes conditions of physical and emotional distress on certain individuals or groups (Bourgois 2001). It is both entrenched and enduring. Debt is embedded in the structures of the New Zealand employment system – unless you have a payment exemption or are earning under the threshold of $19,000 twelve percent of your income goes towards loan repayments. It is also becoming embedded in the structures of our legal system with threats to arrest student loan defaulters living overseas if they return to New Zealand.

Moreover, debt is violent in the ways that it stops some students from meeting their basic needs: the increase in student debt, and the subsequent poverty, led to the creation of the VUWSA (Victoria University of Wellington Student’s Association) foodbank in 1998 and in 2011 686 food parcels were given out to students in need. Additionally, in 2012 the Graduate Longitudinal Study found that 13% of students were in serious financial hardship, and this year Auckland University’s student magazine, Craccum, reported that welfare services have been in constant and increasingly high demand. Furthermore, the neoliberal user-pays ideology that underlies many funding cuts means education is becoming increasingly unrealistic for lower socio-economic groups.

We can also see the concept of symbolic violence at play. Developed by Pierre Bourdieu (2000), symbolic violence looks at how domination operates on an intimate level linking immediate practices and feelings to social domination. The dominated individuals unwittingly consent to their own oppression by perceiving social order and inequality as natural and self-evident. This is illustrated in the widespread misunderstanding of the term ‘loan’ as money that one has to pay back. However, according to standard economic theory the lender, who is seen as directing their resources to a profitable investment, is meant to accept a certain degree of risk. This suggests that paying ones debt has moral reasoning rather than economic. Ideas about accepting ones responsibility, paying your dues and fulfilling your obligations are a powerful part of this, and in New Zealand the idea that one’s debt is one’s own problem is persistent, allowing the violence caused by debt to be embodied by individuals. It promotes the idea that students choose to take on debt, and thus any negative effects it has on their lifestyle is their own problem. This discourages them from participating in action that questions and resists it.

However, an increasing number of students worldwide have expressed their agency by harnessing that which has usually been thought of as oppressive and discouraging, and reconstructing it as inspirational. Debt, they say, should not alienate and oppress students; it should unite them and encourage them into collective action.

In 2012, when the provincial government of Quebec in Canada endeavored to raise tuition fees to the national average, hundreds of thousands of students organized and took part in strikes and demonstrations, calling for the government to abandon their proposals. The student movement succeeded and student fees in Quebec remained the lowest in Canada. In the US where student debt has surpassed one trillion dollars initiatives such as Strike Debt which operates with the motto ‘you are not a loan’, have been set up to encourage the elimination of all outstanding student debt and the retransformation of education into a public good. In 2010, central London was paralyzed by a movement of about 50,000 students protesting against increased tuition fees, whilst in Puerto Rico student protestors, demanded an alternative to budget cuts, and more transparency in university finances. They went on strike for several weeks, forcing the closure of ten out of eleven campuses.

Such students can be found in New Zealand too. In 2011, We Are The University, a collective of Auckland, Wellington, Waikato and Christchurch students, set out to form a national student movement that encouraged discussion and action around issues related to the higher education in New Zealand, in the hope of inspiring students into the type of action that was happening internationally. New Zealand students answered this call, blockading inner-city streets in Auckland to protest budget cuts that would disadvantage students, marching up Victoria University’s Hunter building stairs protesting funding cuts and occupying the over-bridge with a Box University which gave students the chance to create the type of University they wanted. The New Zealand Union of Student Associations followed suit encouraging New Zealand students to put their collective foot down, and declare education to be a public good open to all, not just to those who can already afford it. These examples demonstrate the agency of students who harness that which could potentially discourage activism and reconstruct it into an instrument of inspiration, encouraging students to take action.

My post isn’t intended to encourage you to participate in radical action – I do not expect everyone to start a protest group, to demonstrate or chant outside management headquarters, or to refuse payments of their student loan, although these things would be fantastic. It is, however, intended to make visible the very significant influence debt can have on a student’s choice to participate in activist activity – to recognize the reality and power of debt but also to demonstrate the agency of students who do not accept themselves as helpless victims of structural oppression.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Bourgois, Philippe. 2001. ‘The Power of Violence in War and Peace; Post-Cold War Lessons from El Salvador’. In Ethnography, Vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 5-34.

Comrie-Thomson, Paul. 2010. ‘Strength, Unity and Solidarity: Collectives and Activism in New Zealand’. In Salient, September. Link: http://salient.org.nz/features/strength-unity-and-solidarity-collectives-and-activism-in-new-zealand

Ministry of Education (MoE). 2012. Student Loan Scheme; Annual Report October 2012. Ministry of Education: Wellington .

Russell, Hollie. 2013. ‘Surveillance and Success; Interviewing Student Activists at Victoria University of Wellington’, Cultural Anthropology Honours Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington.