Meredith Mclaughlin
Biography
I am a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in welfare, ethics, and political futures. My ethnographic research in India and the United States asks how realities of redistribution are formed and transformed by moral discourses. What norms of care, fairness, or reciprocity shape the circulation of welfare? What happens when everyday patterns of redistribution do not meet these moral expectations? Across my work, I trace themes of deservingness, responsibility, and respectability in post-liberalization political contexts, where social protection is both the subject of intense moral scrutiny and a central pillar of public policy. I am also committed to decolonial and comparative approaches that cross conventional epistemic divides and can lend fresh insights to the study of development and global social policy.
Before coming to USC, I was a Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Pitzer College and a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, with appointments in the Department of Anthropology and The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute. I received my PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Yale University and my MPhil from the University of Oxford.
Education
- M.Phil. University of Oxford
- Ph.D. Yale University
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- Junior Research Fellow, Homerton College and THIS Institute, University of Cambridge, 2020 – 2024
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Research Keywords
Ethics, welfare, economic anthropology, political anthropology, bureaucracy, public policy, experimentation, liberalization, livelihoods, consumption, development studies, India, the United States.
Detailed Statement of Research Interests
My research addresses questions at the intersections of political anthropology, economic anthropology, and the anthropology of ethics. Some recent preoccupations include: how are practicalities of redistribution contingent on normative social pacts? Can waiting for the state be interpreted as a form of ethical cultivation? How do benefits figure in aspirations for a better life, and what compromises or liabilities might they entail? What can risky attempts to access resources reveal about the ethics of subsistence under neoliberal welfare regimes? These research questions form the heart of four recent publications in preparation and featured in Critique of Anthropology (2022).
My book manuscript (“In Pursuit of Welfare: The Ethics of Distribution in Rural India”) draws on fieldwork in Rajasthan, India to explore how welfare subsidies and cash grants circulate within existing social and moral worlds shaped by norms of reciprocity and parity. In each chapter, I trace how welfare claimants develop expectations for state services, negotiate access through intimate relations, contemplate the value of benefits, and make meaning of uncertainty. Through scenes of the everyday life of redistribution, I show that struggles for material subsistence become central to the cultivation of personal and relational ethics. By emphasizing these social and moral affordances, the book offers a fresh interpretation of how welfare intervenes in the lives of rural beneficiaries. Furthermore, it provincializes conceptions of welfare overdetermined by public policy in the post-industrial Global North by sketching out a vision for social protection grounded in the distributive promises of the rural administration and intimate aspirations for wellbeing and care.I am also developing a second major ethnographic project in the United States, which considers shifting views on economic assistance since the early 2020s. I focus especially on the possibilities and paradoxes of experimental programs that seek to imagine new moral paradigms for social policy (especially unconditional cash transfers). This project examines the intersections between research methods and program design, and asks how lived experiences of experimental distributive paradigms affect perceptions of policy futures. -
Journal Article
- McLaughlin, M. A. (2022). Shifting terms: Development discourses and moral imaginaries in Indian state service provision. Critique of Anthropology. Vol. 42 (3), pp. 254-269.