Teresa Gowan

Teresa Gowan teaches ethnography and urban sociology at the University of Minnesota. Based on several years’ fieldwork across the San Francisco street scene, her ethnography Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco (2010) draws out the multiple discursive tectonics linking the marginal life-world of homeless encampments, shelters, and recycling yards with neoconservative and neoliberal shifts in social policy, urban forms, and public culture. More recently she has been extending her work on contemporary US poverty management with a comparative study of mandatory secular (“strong-arm”) and evangelical addiction treatment. Promising liberation from the demonic or enslaved self, these institutions employ totalistic regimes to impose intimate behavioral control and cognitive reorientation. The rapid growth of court-mandated rehab shows how the contemporary articulation of severe criminal justice sanctions with highly contingent services has not only supercharged US processes of punishment and exclusion, but developed and proliferated more intimate and productive mechanisms of governmentality.