%0 Journal Article
%T ¡®The will to not be empowered (according to your rules)¡¯: Resistance in Finnish participatory social policy
%A Taina Meriluoto
%J Critical Social Policy
%@ 1461-703X
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0261018318764322
%X Participation has increasingly become a means and an end for successful and ¡®empowering¡¯ social policy. Building on previous governmentality critiques of participatory initiatives, this article investigates practices of resistance in the context of Finnish participatory social policy. I adopt a Foucauldian counter-conducts approach as my lens to study critical speech as a form of resistance in initiatives that invite marginalised people as ¡®experts-by-experience¡¯ in social welfare organisations. I illustrate how practices of governing and resistance are intertwined and mutually dependent in a much subtler and more practical manner than allows the often-used analytical dichotomy between dominance and empowerment. As an example, I show how the projects¡¯ attempts to co-opt the participants¡¯ critical speech may also serve as the basis for their subversive self-making and means of ¡®being differently¡¯
%K counter-conduct
%K experts-by-experience
%K governmental ethnography
%K parrhesia
%K participatory initiatives
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0261018318764322