Theorizing Mortal Systemic Exclusion: Homeless Services Bureaucracy as a Necropolitical Complex

• In Event: 50450 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 18: Homelessness

Abstract

Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe describes the increasing tendency of systems of power to render masses of humanity superfluous and disposable, and relegate them to social voids where they are subject to premature death and a spectral existence between citizenship and bare life. This paper analyzes encampment policies and the homeless services bureaucracy in the City of Oakland to test the theoretical framework of necropolitics, and explain how the unhoused mortality crisis persists despite massive state spending on homeless services. It combines theoretical discussion, review of policy documents, and findings from ethnographic fieldwork carried out in encampments, unhoused-led community organizing spaces and public meetings from 2021 through 2026. It finds that the spatial, legal, discursive and institutional fields governing state homelessness response are structured as a necropolitical complex, leading to the creation and maintenance of social voids or “death zones” and an escalating mortality crisis. It argues that rationalized, technocratic service delivery is not on its own a solution to homelessness, because it tends to be tied to criminalization and control and produces reified forms of power-knowledge. It applies the theory’s major concepts of territorialization, sovereignty, and instrumentalization to the case study of Oakland’s homelessness response, and defends the value of a bottom-up rather than state-centric response to homelessness that recognizes the insurgent character of unhoused survival and the inherent agency of the unhoused.

Author

• Armando Solorzano, UC Berkeley