The Shaming State: How Democracies Erode Public Solidarity with Shame with Sara Salman

Sara Salman joins us to discuss her recent book, The Shaming State, which examines the erosion of social rights and the political use of shame against people in need, and argues that shame exacerbates the decline of social solidarity in neoliberal western regimes. Her book investigated the vanishing horizon of social rights in the United States and the dwindling of government support to both lower- and middle-class people. Focusing on Iraqi refugees and white home-owning New Yorkers, she demonstrates how both groups were faced with immense difficulty and humiliation when searching for access to assistance programs maintained by the government. This book explores how shaming is exhibited by state and political institutions by showing the ways in which the state withholds care, and how people who need that care are humiliated for failing to be self-sufficient. All of this is sadly just as relevant in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Sara Salman (Tangata Tiriti Tauiwi), is a criminologist at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka. She studies structural and political violence. Sara examines the relationship between state and citizen in late modern western democratic regimes. Her recent book, The Shaming State, examines the erosion of social rights and the political use of shame against people in need, and argues that shame exacerbates the decline of social solidarity. Sara also researches terrorism and extremist violence. Through the lenses of cultural criminology and critical social theory, she explores these forms of violence in connection to resurgent nationalism and gendered violence. Sara has written on the recruitment of men and women into terrorist groups as well as the connection between gender and extremist violence. Sara engages in public debates on structural and political violence. She has been interviewed in national and international media including Stuff and the New York Times. Her work has appeared in E-Tangata, the NZ Herald, and The Spinoff.