Classed judgements and the prospect of expropriation in Britain

Davey, Ryan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4965-5924 2026. Classed judgements and the prospect of expropriation in Britain. Subjectivity 10.1057/s41286-026-00249-1

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Abstract

Working-class subjectivities in contemporary Britain are shaped not only by past violence but also by the looming prospect of lawful expropriation: eviction, debt enforcement, and state-enforced child removal have all increased in recent decades. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork on a housing estate pseudonymised as Woldham, I develop the concept of expropriability to describe a pervasive, classed condition of vulnerability to the prospect of expropriation. Feminist and postcolonial anthropologists such as Veena Das and Begoña Aretxaga have developed alternatives to psychologistic framings of ‘trauma’ in exploring how the violence of the past endures as it is enfolded into everyday life. I advance on these writers in two ways. First, complementing their temporal focus, I theorize how the future prospect of violence impinges upon subject-formation too. Second, I highlight the importance of class in these processes, specifically through the expropriability of those living on housing estates and in other neighbourhoods marked as ‘deprived’. Residents sometimes responded with an optimism that defended against classed judgement and the prospect of expropriation. Their response challenges theories of the 'spectral' or 'haunting' quality of state violence, suggesting a more complex and varied range of experiences than such theories imply, and demanding close attention to how such experiences vary by class. By analysing how classed judgements and lawful coercion interact in domains of child protection and debt, the article contributes to theories of the role of classed violence in the formation of subjectivity.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education) Schools > School of Social and Spatial Sciences
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
ISSN:	1755-6341
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	2 September 2026
Date of Acceptance:	27 July 2026
Last Modified:	02 Sep 2026 08:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/189328

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