Andrea Muehlebach
Biographic Data
| ID | 3586953 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrea Muehlebach |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrea |
| FAMILY NAME | Muehlebach |
| SIGNATURE | MUEHLEBACH A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0009-0004-2486-7765 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 706 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Swanson, Heather Anne: Spawning Modern Fish. Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon
A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe
In A Vital Frontier Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization. Traversing social, political, legal, and hydrological terrains, Muehlebach situates water as a political fault line at the frontiers of financialization, showing how the seemingly relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is being challenged by an equally relen…
What is a financial frontier
Contract as frontier device, or, the political publics of water infrastructures
This article explores the contract as a mediating device at the financial frontier. Focusing on contracts signed and breached in two instances across 150 years in Berlin, Germany, I argue that contracts are frontier devices that are both durable and volatile in that they seek to bind together two unlike – even incommensurable – contracting parties into formally equal partnerships. Contracts thus seek to enforce certainty and predictability into p…
Life as debt, or debt to life? Water, finance and infrastructure
This paper explores the forms of debt that come into play as public water utilities are privatized and financialized. On the one hand, the financialization of water utilities sets in motion a politics of frantic municipal debt repayment. As infrastructures become financial assets, they also become vehicles for future financial returns. On the other hand, the financialization of water infrastructures often provokes a very different calculus of deb…
Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism by Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Reviewed by: Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism by Elizabeth A. Povinelli Andrea Muehlebach Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 232 pp. What if we thought more about those weird kinds of bacteria that do just fine in environments deprived of oxygen because they breathe rocks? What if we thought more about rocks like manganese, which some geologists say are the byproduct …
Commonwealth: On democracy and dispossession in Italy
This article explores the trajectory of the water movement in Italy to argue that the process of accumulation by dispossession as it is unfolding in Europe is necessarily accompanied by the evacuation of democracy as well. I suggest that Italians have been dispossessed of a thing (the right to public water) and a capacity (to efficacious democratic action). But what they cannot be dispossessed of is the sensorium and practical activity of democra…
The price of austerity: Vital politics and the struggle for public water in southern Italy
This article approaches austerity from the vantage point of its alter ego, financialization, in so far as the radical depletion of public funds creates the conditions for private investment in public goods - including water. It tracks the intense volatilities generated out of the financialization of water by exploring the Italian water movement's campaign of 'civil obedience' - an attempt on the part of citizens to stabilize and thus render just …
The Body of Solidarity: Heritage, Memory, and Materiality in Post-Industrial Italy
This paper explores the rise of 'industrial heritage' and the forms of memorialization proliferating around it. The site is Sesto San Giovanni, Italy's 'City of Factories,' which was also a bastion of communist mobilization and which is now bidding to be recognized on UNESCO's world heritage list. Sesto's bid is an attempt not just to recuperate and reinvigorate the landscape of Sesto's ruined factories and its massive, crumbling machinery, but a…
Anthropologies of Austerity
The Catholicization of Neoliberalism: On Love and Welfare in Lombardy, Italy
In this article, I track the ways in which Catholicism articulates with contemporary neoliberalism. Grounded in an analysis of how neoliberal welfare-state reform in Lombardy, northern Italy, is rendered through core idioms of the Catholic imaginative universe, I argue that the Lombardian case offers general insight into the "moral style" of contemporary neoliberalism. In contrast to the messianic gospel of prosperity exhibited by the Protestant …
On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology
I dedicate this essay to anthropologists' heightened attunement to precarity but also to what Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who passed away last year, called our "moral optimism." As I show, much of our work is written from within and against precarity while at the same time being committed to this specifically anthropological ethic. This ethic permeates many of the articles surveyed here and can be found in all of the sections into which they are grou…
Aftereffects of Utopian Practice
This chapter explores the ways in which ethical citizenship operates as a depoliticizing tool while simultaneously opening up new political possibilities. Almost all the volunteers the author spoke to tie their current sense of belonging and self-worth to past leftist solidaristic practice. The promise entailed in the welfare community—that of a moral community laboring outside the purview of commodified market relations—resonated hugely with peo…
The Private Face of Privatization
This chapter explores the migrant–volunteer “labor encounter” in order to explore the domestic sphere as a space fraught with a set of distinctions that volunteers make between their own labor and that of migrants; distinctions which allow for migrant labor to serve as a catalyst for the appearance of ethical citizenship. For even as immigrant caretakers can sometimes appear as virtuous figures in public cultural debate, especially when proimmigr…
Consecrations: From Welfare State to Welfare Community
This chapter shows that the public production of ethical citizens relies on the sacralization of the social realm, at the center of which stands the figure of the freely laboring citizen volunteer. This social realm is in contrast with the state and the market in that many Italians—scholars, policy makers, politicians, ordinary citizens—endow it with the capacity to transcend social particularism and to encompass a fractured citizenry. Drawing on…
The Production of Compassion
This chapter reflects on the state—how it has inscribed compassion into its own rationalities through a legal regime surrounding voluntarism, and how it has hyperinvested in the production and standardization of an empathetic figure and sector while at the same time withdrawing its welfarist functions. The production of a sympathetic citizenry is, in short, accompanied by a corollary process whereby the state (embodied not only by the law but als…
Ethical Citizenship
Ethical citizenship, which represents, to borrow Émile Durkheim's phrase, a species of solidarity quite different from its twentieth-century (welfarist) forebear, is a fundamentally novel way of conceptualizing collective existence, how it ought to be reproduced and shaped. Scholars of welfare have come to think about citizenship as a set of rights that got rearticulated over time through a series of “citizenship projects.” Social citizenship hin…
An Opulence of Virtue
This chapter introduces the concept of neoliberal moral authoritarianism, though of a very particular kind, which comes in the form of a highly moralized kind of citizenship that has emerged in the northern Italian region of Lombardy. The Italian state has in the last three decades sought to mobilize parts of the population into a new voluntary labor regime—one which has allowed the state to conflate voluntary labor with good citizenship, and unw…
Five an Age Full of Virtue
This chapter tracks the ways in which the moral neoliberal is differentially extracted from across the generational spectrum, as public opinion construes the elderly as a privileged locus of publicly valuable affect and action. It shows that the moral neoliberal finds its paradigmatic expression in a segment of the population that law and other public interventions figure as wealthy in both material and temporal senses, and which can therefore be…
The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy
Morality is often imagined to be at odds with capitalism and its focus on the bottom line, but in 'The Moral Neoliberal' morality is shown as the opposite: an indispensable tool for capitalist transformation. The author tracks the phenomenal rise of voluntarism in the wake of the state's withdrawal of social service programmes
On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy
This article explores the role that compassion plays in the building of a post-Fordist laboring public in Italy. By exploring how the state has made compassion productive through new regimes of voluntary labor, this piece shows that compassion operates not as a mitigating force against, but as a vehicle for the production and maintenance of a new exclusionary order precisely because it allows for the emergence of a fantasy of spontaneously availa…
Complexio Oppositorum: Notes on the Left in Neoliberal Italy
The contemporary situation is seldom best characterized as a battlefield with clearly drawn political dividing lines. In fact, neoliberalism is often better understood as a form to contain the oppositional—old leftist solidarity and new rightist utopias—and fold them into a single moral order: a complexio oppositorum, in Carl Schmitt's words
What Self in Self-Determination? Notes from the Frontiers of Transnational Indigenous Activism
The indigenous quest for self-determination is an attempt to give voice to local injustice in a universal language, and to make claims to difference via a right that applies equally to all peoples. This article explores recent developments in the transnational indigenous movement's struggle for the right of self-determination by pointing out that this polyvalence-like the indeterminacies of the concepts of "peoples" and "indigenous"-is a producti…
"Making Place" at the United Nations: Indigenous Cultural Politics at the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations
The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy
Morality is often imagined to be at odds with capitalism and its focus on the bottom line, but in 'The Moral Neoliberal' morality is shown as the opposite: an indispensable tool for capitalist transformation. The author tracks the phenomenal rise of voluntarism in the wake of the state's withdrawal of social service programmes
On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy
This article explores the role that compassion plays in the building of a post-Fordist laboring public in Italy. By exploring how the state has made compassion productive through new regimes of voluntary labor, this piece shows that compassion operates not as a mitigating force against, but as a vehicle for the production and maintenance of a new exclusionary order precisely because it allows for the emergence of a fantasy of spontaneously availa…
"Making Place" at the United Nations: Indigenous Cultural Politics at the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations
On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology
I dedicate this essay to anthropologists' heightened attunement to precarity but also to what Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who passed away last year, called our "moral optimism." As I show, much of our work is written from within and against precarity while at the same time being committed to this specifically anthropological ethic. This ethic permeates many of the articles surveyed here and can be found in all of the sections into which they are grou…
The Catholicization of Neoliberalism: On Love and Welfare in Lombardy, Italy
In this article, I track the ways in which Catholicism articulates with contemporary neoliberalism. Grounded in an analysis of how neoliberal welfare-state reform in Lombardy, northern Italy, is rendered through core idioms of the Catholic imaginative universe, I argue that the Lombardian case offers general insight into the "moral style" of contemporary neoliberalism. In contrast to the messianic gospel of prosperity exhibited by the Protestant …
The Body of Solidarity: Heritage, Memory, and Materiality in Post-Industrial Italy
This paper explores the rise of 'industrial heritage' and the forms of memorialization proliferating around it. The site is Sesto San Giovanni, Italy's 'City of Factories,' which was also a bastion of communist mobilization and which is now bidding to be recognized on UNESCO's world heritage list. Sesto's bid is an attempt not just to recuperate and reinvigorate the landscape of Sesto's ruined factories and its massive, crumbling machinery, but a…
Anthropologies of Austerity
Complexio Oppositorum: Notes on the Left in Neoliberal Italy
The contemporary situation is seldom best characterized as a battlefield with clearly drawn political dividing lines. In fact, neoliberalism is often better understood as a form to contain the oppositional—old leftist solidarity and new rightist utopias—and fold them into a single moral order: a complexio oppositorum, in Carl Schmitt's words
What is a financial frontier
Commonwealth: On democracy and dispossession in Italy
This article explores the trajectory of the water movement in Italy to argue that the process of accumulation by dispossession as it is unfolding in Europe is necessarily accompanied by the evacuation of democracy as well. I suggest that Italians have been dispossessed of a thing (the right to public water) and a capacity (to efficacious democratic action). But what they cannot be dispossessed of is the sensorium and practical activity of democra…
The price of austerity: Vital politics and the struggle for public water in southern Italy
This article approaches austerity from the vantage point of its alter ego, financialization, in so far as the radical depletion of public funds creates the conditions for private investment in public goods - including water. It tracks the intense volatilities generated out of the financialization of water by exploring the Italian water movement's campaign of 'civil obedience' - an attempt on the part of citizens to stabilize and thus render just …
Life as debt, or debt to life? Water, finance and infrastructure
This paper explores the forms of debt that come into play as public water utilities are privatized and financialized. On the one hand, the financialization of water utilities sets in motion a politics of frantic municipal debt repayment. As infrastructures become financial assets, they also become vehicles for future financial returns. On the other hand, the financialization of water infrastructures often provokes a very different calculus of deb…
Contract as frontier device, or, the political publics of water infrastructures
This article explores the contract as a mediating device at the financial frontier. Focusing on contracts signed and breached in two instances across 150 years in Berlin, Germany, I argue that contracts are frontier devices that are both durable and volatile in that they seek to bind together two unlike – even incommensurable – contracting parties into formally equal partnerships. Contracts thus seek to enforce certainty and predictability into p…
A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe
In A Vital Frontier Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization. Traversing social, political, legal, and hydrological terrains, Muehlebach situates water as a political fault line at the frontiers of financialization, showing how the seemingly relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is being challenged by an equally relen…
Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism by Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Reviewed by: Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism by Elizabeth A. Povinelli Andrea Muehlebach Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 232 pp. What if we thought more about those weird kinds of bacteria that do just fine in environments deprived of oxygen because they breathe rocks? What if we thought more about rocks like manganese, which some geologists say are the byproduct …
"Making Place" at the United Nations: Indigenous Cultural Politics at the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations
What Self in Self-Determination? Notes from the Frontiers of Transnational Indigenous Activism
The indigenous quest for self-determination is an attempt to give voice to local injustice in a universal language, and to make claims to difference via a right that applies equally to all peoples. This article explores recent developments in the transnational indigenous movement's struggle for the right of self-determination by pointing out that this polyvalence-like the indeterminacies of the concepts of "peoples" and "indigenous"-is a producti…
Complexio Oppositorum: Notes on the Left in Neoliberal Italy
The contemporary situation is seldom best characterized as a battlefield with clearly drawn political dividing lines. In fact, neoliberalism is often better understood as a form to contain the oppositional—old leftist solidarity and new rightist utopias—and fold them into a single moral order: a complexio oppositorum, in Carl Schmitt's words
On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy
This article explores the role that compassion plays in the building of a post-Fordist laboring public in Italy. By exploring how the state has made compassion productive through new regimes of voluntary labor, this piece shows that compassion operates not as a mitigating force against, but as a vehicle for the production and maintenance of a new exclusionary order precisely because it allows for the emergence of a fantasy of spontaneously availa…
Aftereffects of Utopian Practice
This chapter explores the ways in which ethical citizenship operates as a depoliticizing tool while simultaneously opening up new political possibilities. Almost all the volunteers the author spoke to tie their current sense of belonging and self-worth to past leftist solidaristic practice. The promise entailed in the welfare community—that of a moral community laboring outside the purview of commodified market relations—resonated hugely with peo…
The Private Face of Privatization
This chapter explores the migrant–volunteer “labor encounter” in order to explore the domestic sphere as a space fraught with a set of distinctions that volunteers make between their own labor and that of migrants; distinctions which allow for migrant labor to serve as a catalyst for the appearance of ethical citizenship. For even as immigrant caretakers can sometimes appear as virtuous figures in public cultural debate, especially when proimmigr…
Consecrations: From Welfare State to Welfare Community
This chapter shows that the public production of ethical citizens relies on the sacralization of the social realm, at the center of which stands the figure of the freely laboring citizen volunteer. This social realm is in contrast with the state and the market in that many Italians—scholars, policy makers, politicians, ordinary citizens—endow it with the capacity to transcend social particularism and to encompass a fractured citizenry. Drawing on…
The Production of Compassion
This chapter reflects on the state—how it has inscribed compassion into its own rationalities through a legal regime surrounding voluntarism, and how it has hyperinvested in the production and standardization of an empathetic figure and sector while at the same time withdrawing its welfarist functions. The production of a sympathetic citizenry is, in short, accompanied by a corollary process whereby the state (embodied not only by the law but als…
Ethical Citizenship
Ethical citizenship, which represents, to borrow Émile Durkheim's phrase, a species of solidarity quite different from its twentieth-century (welfarist) forebear, is a fundamentally novel way of conceptualizing collective existence, how it ought to be reproduced and shaped. Scholars of welfare have come to think about citizenship as a set of rights that got rearticulated over time through a series of “citizenship projects.” Social citizenship hin…
An Opulence of Virtue
This chapter introduces the concept of neoliberal moral authoritarianism, though of a very particular kind, which comes in the form of a highly moralized kind of citizenship that has emerged in the northern Italian region of Lombardy. The Italian state has in the last three decades sought to mobilize parts of the population into a new voluntary labor regime—one which has allowed the state to conflate voluntary labor with good citizenship, and unw…
Five an Age Full of Virtue
This chapter tracks the ways in which the moral neoliberal is differentially extracted from across the generational spectrum, as public opinion construes the elderly as a privileged locus of publicly valuable affect and action. It shows that the moral neoliberal finds its paradigmatic expression in a segment of the population that law and other public interventions figure as wealthy in both material and temporal senses, and which can therefore be…
The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy
Morality is often imagined to be at odds with capitalism and its focus on the bottom line, but in 'The Moral Neoliberal' morality is shown as the opposite: an indispensable tool for capitalist transformation. The author tracks the phenomenal rise of voluntarism in the wake of the state's withdrawal of social service programmes
The Catholicization of Neoliberalism: On Love and Welfare in Lombardy, Italy
In this article, I track the ways in which Catholicism articulates with contemporary neoliberalism. Grounded in an analysis of how neoliberal welfare-state reform in Lombardy, northern Italy, is rendered through core idioms of the Catholic imaginative universe, I argue that the Lombardian case offers general insight into the "moral style" of contemporary neoliberalism. In contrast to the messianic gospel of prosperity exhibited by the Protestant …
On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology
I dedicate this essay to anthropologists' heightened attunement to precarity but also to what Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who passed away last year, called our "moral optimism." As I show, much of our work is written from within and against precarity while at the same time being committed to this specifically anthropological ethic. This ethic permeates many of the articles surveyed here and can be found in all of the sections into which they are grou…
Anthropologies of Austerity
The price of austerity: Vital politics and the struggle for public water in southern Italy
This article approaches austerity from the vantage point of its alter ego, financialization, in so far as the radical depletion of public funds creates the conditions for private investment in public goods - including water. It tracks the intense volatilities generated out of the financialization of water by exploring the Italian water movement's campaign of 'civil obedience' - an attempt on the part of citizens to stabilize and thus render just …
The Body of Solidarity: Heritage, Memory, and Materiality in Post-Industrial Italy
This paper explores the rise of 'industrial heritage' and the forms of memorialization proliferating around it. The site is Sesto San Giovanni, Italy's 'City of Factories,' which was also a bastion of communist mobilization and which is now bidding to be recognized on UNESCO's world heritage list. Sesto's bid is an attempt not just to recuperate and reinvigorate the landscape of Sesto's ruined factories and its massive, crumbling machinery, but a…
Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism by Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Reviewed by: Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism by Elizabeth A. Povinelli Andrea Muehlebach Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 232 pp. What if we thought more about those weird kinds of bacteria that do just fine in environments deprived of oxygen because they breathe rocks? What if we thought more about rocks like manganese, which some geologists say are the byproduct …
Commonwealth: On democracy and dispossession in Italy
This article explores the trajectory of the water movement in Italy to argue that the process of accumulation by dispossession as it is unfolding in Europe is necessarily accompanied by the evacuation of democracy as well. I suggest that Italians have been dispossessed of a thing (the right to public water) and a capacity (to efficacious democratic action). But what they cannot be dispossessed of is the sensorium and practical activity of democra…
A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe
In A Vital Frontier Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization. Traversing social, political, legal, and hydrological terrains, Muehlebach situates water as a political fault line at the frontiers of financialization, showing how the seemingly relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is being challenged by an equally relen…
What is a financial frontier
Contract as frontier device, or, the political publics of water infrastructures
This article explores the contract as a mediating device at the financial frontier. Focusing on contracts signed and breached in two instances across 150 years in Berlin, Germany, I argue that contracts are frontier devices that are both durable and volatile in that they seek to bind together two unlike – even incommensurable – contracting parties into formally equal partnerships. Contracts thus seek to enforce certainty and predictability into p…
Life as debt, or debt to life? Water, finance and infrastructure
This paper explores the forms of debt that come into play as public water utilities are privatized and financialized. On the one hand, the financialization of water utilities sets in motion a politics of frantic municipal debt repayment. As infrastructures become financial assets, they also become vehicles for future financial returns. On the other hand, the financialization of water infrastructures often provokes a very different calculus of deb…
Swanson, Heather Anne: Spawning Modern Fish. Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon
Political science (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (5 works) · Political economy (5 works)