By Sleight of Neoliberal Logics: Street Youth, Workfare, and the Everyday Tactics of Survival in London, Ontario, Canada

Publisher： John Wiley & Sons Inc

E-ISSN： 1548-744x|27|2|116-135

ISSN： 0893-0465

Source： CITY AND SOCIETY, Vol.27, Iss.2, 2015-08, pp. : 116-135

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Abstract

Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork with street youths in a mid‐sized city in Ontario, Canada, this paper centers on the ways some street youths are engaging in partial accommodation and selective resistance to Ontario's workfare program; Ontario Works (OW). Owing to its neoliberal reconceptualization in the mid 1990's OW “participants”—in order to receive social assistance—must engage in a documentable effort to pursue employment, practical education or skills‐development leading to entry into the labor market. However, many of my informants are unable or unwilling to seek low‐wage, precarious work; the only form of work available to them. Through creative interpretation and manipulation of OW rules, I argue that street youth challenge the redefinition of the morality of poverty through OW's neoliberal policies and discursive strategies, and refashion a moral economy based on survival and making do. Their alternative moral economy reveals the limits of the state's reach and effort to domesticate marginalized youths.