LIST OF PANELS

Critical policy studies have examined how public policies construct problems, classify target populations, distribute recognition, and define state intervention. Much of this debate uses the language of invisibility: populations the state fails to see, experiences that do not become policy problems, and forms of suffering outside official categories. This workshop proposes a complementary displacement. In many policy fields, marginalized groups are not simply invisible. They are intensely visible through colonial regimes of classification, surveillance, eligibility, suspicion, vulnerability, risk, and dependency.

Building on the concepts of coloniality of public policies and tutelary emancipations (Brasil, 2025, 2026), the workshop asks what changes when the body becomes central to policy analysis. Public policies do not only distribute resources or respond to predefined social problems. They classify, discipline, protect, expose, monitor, and correct bodies, defining which ones become recognizable as vulnerable, threatening, productive, dependent, governable, or disposable. From social assistance to migration policy, from policing to health care, from education to digital government, policies materialize in bodily experiences of waiting, inspection, documentation, humiliation, care, fear, exhaustion, and conditional recognition.

The category of tutelary emancipations is useful because many contemporary policies promise inclusion, autonomy, citizenship, or protection while requiring continuous proof of adequacy, compliance, deservingness, and institutional legibility. This contradiction is not merely a design failure. It reveals a deeper rationality through which the state recognizes subjects while keeping them administratively dependent. The workshop therefore moves from the abstract target population to the embodied subject of policy, examining how coloniality persists not only in narratives or institutional designs, but also in the production of governable bodies.

General Objectives

The workshop has three objectives. First, it moves from state invisibility to colonial visibility, asking how marginalized bodies become legible to the state. Second, it connects embodiment to critical policy analysis by examining how policy categories, eligibility criteria, implementation practices, and evaluation regimes produce embodied effects. Third, it explores how decolonial perspectives from Latin America and the Global South can reframe policy analysis beyond technocratic or institution-centered approaches. The framework of coloniality in public policies, especially its epistemic, institutional, territorial, and subjective dimensions, will guide the discussion.

Research Questions

The central question is: how do public policies that promise inclusion, protection, or emancipation produce bodies that are simultaneously recognized, monitored, corrected, and governed? The workshop will address: what bodies do public policies produce, protect, discipline, or expose? How do categories such as vulnerability, risk, dependency, informality, illegality, disability, deservingness, or exclusion become attached to concrete bodies? How do bureaucratic encounters, registries, conditionalities, biometric systems, and street-level practices materialize policy power? In what ways does coloniality distinguish bodies that govern from bodies that are governed?

Scientific Relevance

This workshop contributes to critical policy studies by bringing embodiment into the center of policy inquiry. Although embodiment appears in feminist theory, critical race studies, disability studies, migration studies, health research, and anthropology of the state, it remains underdeveloped as a systematic lens for public policy analysis. The workshop treats the body not as a secondary effect of policy, but as one of the primary sites where policy becomes real.

The proposal is particularly relevant for an IPA conference in Brazil. In Latin America, public policies have historically been shaped by colonial hierarchies of race, class, gender, territory, and knowledge. These hierarchies are inscribed in bodies through policing, social assistance, maternal responsibility, urban segregation, racialized suspicion, territorial stigma, health inequalities, and bureaucratic exposure. By connecting coloniality, tutelary emancipation, corporeality, and critical reflexivity, the workshop invites scholars to examine not only what counts as a public problem, but whose bodies count as objects of concern, correction, protection, or control.

Critical-Pedagogical Dynamics

The workshop will follow a critical-pedagogical orientation. Rather than treating papers as isolated presentations, the session will build a collective embodied policy map. Each paper will contribute one analytical fragment by identifying a policy category, the body it produces, the institutional relation it sustains, and the form of colonial visibility it reveals. The final product will be a shared interpretive device for thinking how public policies materialize in bodies and how knowledge is produced across positionalities, territories, and policy experiences.

Call for Papers

This workshop welcomes papers that examine embodied dimensions of public policy from interpretive, critical, decolonial, feminist, antiracist, postcolonial, anthropological, or sociological perspectives. We especially welcome contributions that analyze how policies classify, regulate, discipline, protect, expose, or produce bodies in concrete institutional contexts.

Possible themes include embodied experiences of social assistance, health, education, migration, policing, housing, disability, gender, race, and poverty policies; racialized and gendered classifications in policy design and implementation; bodily effects of waiting, documentation, conditionality, surveillance, and eligibility; street-level bureaucracy and embodied encounters with the state; biometric technologies and legible bodies; coloniality, territory, and corporeal hierarchies in Latin America and the Global South. Participants may submit theoretical, methodological, or empirical papers.

Requirements for Applicants

The workshop welcomes researchers, graduate students, public managers, practitioners, and activists interested in interpretive policy analysis, public service interactions, emotions in policy processes, social inequalities, inclusive institutions, and critical approaches to public administration.

Following the selection process, participants will be expected to submit a more developed paper (1.500-2.000 words) that engages more deeply with one of the issues or themes introduced in the abstract proposal.

Language

The workshop will be conducted in Portuguese, with AI-assisted translation support in English and Spanish.

References

Boullosa, R. de F., Paul, R., & Smith-Carrier, T. (2023). Democratizing science is an urgent, collective, and continuous project. Critical Policy Studies, 17(1), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2023.2184707

Boossabong, P., Boullosa, R. de F., & Paul, R. (2025). Critical reflexivity in policy studies is ‘a skin, not a sweater’. Critical Policy Studies, 19(4), 531–534. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2025.2589104

Brasil, E. (2025). Emancipações tuteladas: colonialidade e produção de sujeitos nas políticas públicas. Revista Brasileira de Gestão Pública, 4(1). https://www.portaldeperiodicos.idp.edu.br/rbgp/article/view/8875

Brasil, E. (2026). A colonialidade das políticas públicas: a construção do outro como dispositivo de dominação. Revista do Serviço Público, 77(1), 79–109. https://doi.org/10.21874/rsp.v77i1.11455

Carneiro, S. (2023). Dispositivo de racialidade. Zahar.

Jhagroe, S., & Salazar-Morales, D. (2025). A theory of policy coloniality. Critical Policy Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2025.2533758

Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla, 1(3), 533–580.