Abstract

BUCHELY IBARRA, Lina Fernanda. Bureaucratic Activism and the Worldly Life of the State. Community Mothers as Street-level Bureaucrats and the Childcare program Welfare Homes. Rev. colomb. antropol. [online]. 2015, vol.51, n.1, pp.137-159. ISSN 0486-6525.

This article discusses the spaces of the outsourced social policy known as Welfare Homes as new scenarios in which the idea of what is public is produced and negotiated. Gathering up the main findings of the fieldwork developed with community mothers in different Colombian cities, the text suggests that there are public and non-state areas where streetlevel bureaucracies produce, at its discretion, the rule of law as a language of the state. In this sense, the production of the public in post-neoliberal scenarios has a life beyond the State, without stop depending on it, which takes place in everyday scenarios. That new existence of the public is far from the institutional, vertical and ritualized State idea that has been standardized by Weber's reading of the public administration.

Keywords : burocracias callejeras; trabajo reproductivo; madres comunitarias; programa Hogares Comunitarios de Bienestar; Street-level bureaucracies; reproductive work; community mothers; Welfare Homes social program.

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