Abandonment: “Caring” the Late-Capitalist Way

• In Event: Displaced Populations of Late Capitalism

Abstract

Young people experience the changing rhetorics and imagery associated with late capitalism in particular and expanding ways. As such, this project looks to address these issues by providing a critical counter to the culture of caring given to today's youth, one that continues to displace, exclude, abandon, and alienate while opening and expanding market logics. By furthering the precarity created by late-capitalism, neoliberalized notions of care continue to have value in the discourse concerning young people. At the same time, such discourse functions within logics that place the reality of caring as means of abandonment and displacement. Furthermore, this paper sees such acts of “caring” as techniques of demobilization, helping to further serve the neoliberal state by making a particular population more amenable to control.

Author

• Justin Turner, Old Dominion University