Contributions > Papers - by speaker > Gray Breda

The rise neoliberal rationalities of governance across late-modern capitalist societies has been linked to a new phase of shifting relationships between religion, the state and the market. This changing landscape of governance has implications for how citizenship is constructed and lived. In this paper, I investigate the proposition that the Keynesian welfare state, and its secular, national, and statist model of post-war citizenship based on rights and equality, is being replaced by a multi-scaled neoliberal model of citizenship founded on privatised moral duty and fellow feeling. The paper examines the ways in which social provisioning in this neoliberal model produces a postsecular citizenship, often through appeals to religiously-inflected duties of care both locally and transnationally. It does so by critically evaluating two theoretical accounts of emergent relationships between the neoliberal project and religion: first, the view that neoliberal govermentalities, the secular and the religious are co-constituted in a new form of postsecuar rapproachment (Cloke, Beaumont and Williams), and second, through the notion of the moral neoliberal as an effect of Catholicised neoliberal techniques of rule in which citizenship is ‘to be lived with the heart' (Muehlebach). The paper brings these empircally based theoretical frameworks into dialogue with findings from a transnational study of work with migrants by Catholic Church initiated and run organisations to examine their role as partners in transnational, national and local governance.