Making a Life on Mean Welfare: Voices from Multicultural Sydney

Mitchell explores how people living at the sharp end of Australia's welfare system negotiate the cultural assumptions and practical hurdles of contemporary social support. She problematizes how welfare policy moralizes the actions, life changes, and choices of people receiving government income support-welfare or the dole-but also describes the multiple cultural resources that welfare users draw on to position themselves as moral subjects in strained circumstances. Policy Press in an imprint of Bristol University Press. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
We are often told that mean welfare is what the public wants. Whether or not that's true, this book encourages us to at least be honest about what that entails. It explores how diverse welfare users navigate the personal and practical hurdles of Australia’s so-called social security system, where benefits are deliberately meagre and come with strings attached. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a region of Sydney known for ethnic diversity and socio-economic disadvantage, Emma Mitchell brings her own experience of belonging to a poor family long reliant on welfare to her research. This book shows the different cultural resources that people bring to welfare encounters with a sensitivity and subtlety that are often missing in both sympathetic and cynical accounts of life on welfare.