Neoliberal Governance and Faith-Based Initiatives: Agentive Cracks in the Logic Informing Homeless Sheltering in South Carolina's Capital

This essay began as part of a session honoring Vincent Lyon-Callo's ethnography of governmentality and structural violence in the homeless sheltering industry, in which he worked in Massachusetts. This is a review of his book Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance: Activist Ethnography in the Homeless Sheltering Industry, and also an application of Lyon-Callo's argument. He encourages attention to the neoliberal logic and structural conditions shaping understandings and experiences of homelessness. In this essay, I discuss visits with students (who have read his book) to homeless shelters in Columbia, South Carolina, and analyze a long-term debate in the city about where to locate a large service facility for the homeless. I argue that the national neoliberal and neoconservative policy of strengthening faith-based initiatives in providing public services ironically reduced the possibility of neoliberal governance of those services at the local level, as when business owners ask the city to reduce the visibility of homelessness in the commercial district.