Moral Economies, Urban Subjectivities, and Contested Policies: An Intersectional Perspective on Privileges and Exclusion.
Résumé
This themed section focuses on the intersectional politics of the production of moral economies in urban contexts. It asks how public policies contribute to the moral normativities that affect how differently positioned actors live in urban space. Drawing on various empirical case studies, it questions public policies and their entanglements with processes of inclusion and exclusion in everyday urban life, along intersectional lines of gender, race, class and religion. Extending the work of Didier Fassin (2009, 1257), it assembles papers that explore a working definition of the moral economy as “the production, distribution, circulation, and use of moral sentiments, emotions and values, and norms and obligations in social space”. Three main salient axes are consequently addressed: violence and security issues; the framing of un/desirable subjects by public policies; the circulation and contextual appropriation of urban and gender policies in the context of globalisation. The contributions collected here analyse both how these spatial differences are produced through policies, and how differently embodied subjects experience, navigate, and contest the urban moral regimes to which they are subjected. This collection aims thereby at integrating an analysis that is aware of intersections of gender, class, sexuality, migratory backgrounds and race in the making of un/desirable subjects.