Territorialities of poverty in contemporary Argentina:

reorientations in socio-assistance interventions with a local approach, in Argentina (2008-2019)

Abstract

The article exposes points of convergence, displacements and tensions in the problematizations and practices that national State deploys daily on the target territories of its socio-assistance interventions, between the period 2008-2019, in Argentina. For the analysis, we selected two specific national policies that present themselves as novel: “Plan Ahí” and “Estado en tu Barrio”. From a qualitative approach, that articulates heterogeneous data production techniques, the programs are analyzed as cases that allow to illuminate the specific rationalities that guided the government interventions between the cycles defined as post-neoliberalism and neoliberal return, as well as to elucidate the processes through which the empirical referents are constituted, meanings and reoriented. The article affirms that some transformations took place in the way of conceiving and modulating the State-territory relationship that show the passage from a community scheme of cutting and configuring impoverished territories towards a logic that reconfigures and approaches these spaces in terms of aggregates of singled out individuals.