Towards a geographical account of shame: Foodbanks, austerity, and the spaces of austere affective governmentality

Abstract

This paper is about shame, its geographies, and its role in the government of conduct in austerity Britain. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data from a Trussell Trust foodbank in the Valleys of South Wales, the geography of shame is investigated through its spatiality, temporality, and politics. Together, these avenues demonstrate how shame not only acts over those individual bodies experiencing food poverty but also realises an operation of power for pushing austere conducts onto collective populations. Reading shame in this fashion necessitates two critical interventions. First, this paper builds a geographical account of shame that provides an alternative route through psychological and sociological understandings – culminating in a re-definition of shame as the feeling that emerges from a contested un-covering of out-of-placeness. Second, this paper adds a geographical contribution to emergent theorisation of “affective governmentality.” By positioning “shameful subsistence” as a specific affective governmentality at a time of austerity, this paper departs from previous studies of governmentality that tend to emphasise the numerical and statistical as the primary “technical factors” used to govern life. This paper demonstrates how shame is not limited to the spaces and users of foodbanks: rather, shame is a central framework for understanding the contemporary politics of austerity both in the places it creates and through the feelings, behaviours, and values it encourages.