STS
Circle at Harvard
Marc Aidinoff
PhD
candidate, History,
Anthropology, and STS
MIT
"Digital Welfare Reform: The
Constitutional Project of
Computerizing Government"
12:15-1:30 pm
Monday, Apr. 12, 2021
Virtual via Zoom
Please register on Zoom
here.
Abstract:
In the 1980s and 90s, “New
Democrats,” many proudly taking
up the banner of neo-liberalism,
promised a new welfare state.
They committed to “end welfare
as we know it.” This political
project, to revive the partisan
label of liberalism, was equally
a technical endeavor. It
required the imagined
technological capacity to
administer the entitlements of
citizenship with an
ever-evolving logic and
specificity. To explicate that
logic, I draw on the archive of
Mississippi’s welfare
administration system, where the
desire to modernize the Old
South was particularly acute. I
treat the work of computerizing
welfare in Mississippi as a
constitutional process. Doing so
recognizes the welfare state as
something in progress, a
soon-to-be-reformed state that
relied on the constant promise
of renewed modernization and
upgrade. This digital welfare
state simultaneously expanded
the reach of state power and
foreclosed the possibility of
universal welfare entitlements,
let alone rights.
Bio:
Marc Aidinoff is a
doctoral candidate in MIT’s
program in History,
Anthropology, and STS (HASTS)
where he examines the
interplay between technology
policy and social policy. His
dissertation, “A More Updated
Union: New Liberals and their
New Computers in the New New
South, 1984-2004” traces the
computerization of welfare in
the United States and the rise
of centrist Democratic
politics. He has served as a
strategist for Democratic
campaigns and as an assistant
director for domestic and
economic policy in the
Obama-Biden White House.
|
