Resume

• 2019

  Greater St. Louis Area

  Associate Professor of Anthropology

  Saint Louis University

• 2013

  Saint Louis University

  Greater St. Louis Area

  Bruce O’Neill is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology and in the Center for Intercultural Studies at Saint Louis University. You can learn more about his work by visiting his faculty webpage: https://bruceoneill.academia.edu

  Assistant Professor of Anthropology

  Saint Louis University

  Visiting Lecturer

  American Studies

  Bucharest

  Romania

  Universitatea din Bucuresti

• 2007

  Universitatea din Bucuresti

  Universitatea din Bucuresti

  City of New York

  Urban Fellow

  Economic Development Corporation

  Greater New York City Area

  City of New York

  Visiting Lecturer

  American Studies

  Bucharest

  Romania

  Universitatea din Bucuresti

• 2006

  English

  Romanian

  Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

  Masters of Arts (A.M.) Cultural & Social Anthropology \n2006 - 2007

  Anthropology

  Stanford University

• 2005

  Master of Science (MSc)

  City

  Space & Society (Department of Geography & Environment)

  London School of Economics and Political Science

• 2003

  Visiting Student

  Philosophy

  University of Oxford

• 2000

  Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

  Philosophy & Sociology

  Villanova University

• Consumption

  Theory

  Ethnography

  Unemployment

  Cultural Studies

  Ethics

  Teaching

  Social Anthropology

  Homelessness

  Urban Geography

  Eastern Europe

  Research

  Social Responsibility

  Lecturing

  Romanian

  Digital Photography

  Grant Writing

  Qualitative Research

  Urbanism

  Social Inequality

  Cast Aside: Boredom and Downward Mobility in Post-Communist Bucharest

  Romania

  The homeless

  in post-Communist Bucharest

  Romania

  are bored. They describe themselves as bored all of the time. Drawing upon nearly three years of ethnographic fieldwork that moves between Bucharest’s homeless shelters and squatter camps

  day centers and public parks

  this article approaches the homeless’ boredom as an everyday affect structured by the politics of consumption in post-Communist Bucharest

  Romania. At the center of this study sits not simply the inability to consume

  but also the feeling of being cast aside

  of being downwardly mobile in an era of supposed neoliberal ascent. In an increasingly consumer-driven society

  boredom

  I argue

  is an affective state that registers within the modality of time the newly homeless’ expulsion to the margins of the city. In this sense

  boredom is a persistent form of social suffering made possible by a crisis-generated shift in the so-called global economy

  one that has forced tens of millions of people the world over to come to terms with diminished economic capacities.

  Cast Aside: Boredom and Downward Mobility in Post-Communist Bucharest

  Romania

  This article explores how the construction of monumental streetscapes turns city spaces into technologies of political control. It is the central claim that monumental spaces are not just static representations of particular ideologies; rather

  the production of monumental spaces contributes to the project of autocratic governance. It is an argument rooted in the claim that governance and spatiality exist dialectically

  structuring and reinforcing one another. The discussion is centered on the case of Nicolae Ceausescu and his construction of the Victory of Socialism Civic Center over historic Bucharest

  Romania. Linking the construction of the Civic Center's space to Ceausescu's practice of governance demonstrates that the organization of space structures bureaucracy

  people and thought.

  The Political Agency of Cityscapes: Spatializing Governance in Ceausescu’s Bucharest

  In The Space of Boredom Bruce O'Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom. Focusing on Bucharest

  Romania

  where the 2008 financial crisis compounded the failures of the postsocialist state to deliver on the promises of liberalism

  O'Neill shows how the city's homeless are unable to fully participate in a society that is increasingly organized around practices of consumption. Without a job to work

  a home to make

  or money to spend

  the homeless—who include pensioners abandoned by their families and the state—struggle daily with the slow deterioration of their lives. O'Neill moves between homeless shelters and squatter camps

  black labor markets and transit stations

  detailing the lives of men and women who manage boredom by seeking stimulation

  from conversation and coffee to sex in public restrooms or going to the mall or IKEA. Showing how boredom correlates with the downward mobility of Bucharest's homeless

  O'Neill theorizes boredom as an enduring affect of globalization in order to provide a foundation from which to rethink the politics of alienation and displacement.

  The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order

  Kevin L. O'Neill

  This chapter analyzes the case of St. Louis

  Missouri

  one of the most violent

  racially segregated

  and polarized city-regions in the United States. The specific interest here is in the failed passage of Proposition M

  a ballot measure put forward by city planners to expand the city’s bus and light rail systems further into the suburban region. Reading the expansion of public transportation as dangerous

  suburban residents voted down this measure. This chapter argues that such an exercise in individual rights (successful as it was) ultimately belies what urban planners in St. Louis approximate

  and what we conceive

  as regional responsibility. At stake in understanding regional responsibility ethnographically is a sense that city-regions embed residents into a series of relationships that are not chosen but that cannot be ignored.

  “The Scales of Justice: Region

  Rights & Responsibility in St. Louis Missouri.”

  Infrastructural Violence: Introduction to the Special Issue

  Dennis Rodgers (First Author)

  This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of 'infrastructural violence'. We begin by considering infrastructure as an ethnographically graspable manifestation

  before then moving on to highlight how broader processes of marginalization

  abjection and disconnection often become operational and sustainable in contemporary cities through infrastructure. We then show how the concept of ‘infrastructural violence’ can nuance our analyses of the relations between people and things that converge daily in urban life to the detriment of marginalized actors

  while also proposing a normative reflexivity that can provide a concrete means through which to talk

  imagine and build towards greater regimes of quality and collective benefit. Finally

  we conclude with a summary of each of the contributions to this special issue.

  Infrastructural Violence: Introduction to the Special Issue

  In The Space of Boredom Bruce O'Neill explores how those people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom. Focusing on Bucharest

  Romania

  where the 2008 financial crisis compounded the failures of the postsocialist state to deliver on the promises of liberalism

  O'Neill shows how the city's homeless are unable to fully participate in a society that is increasingly organized around practices of consumption. Without a job to work

  a home to make

  or money to spend

  the homeless—who include pensioners abandoned by their families and the state—struggle daily with the slow deterioration of their lives. O'Neill moves between homeless shelters and squatter camps

  black labor markets and transit stations

  detailing the lives of men and women who manage boredom by seeking stimulation

  from conversation and coffee to sex in public restrooms or going to the mall or IKEA. Showing how boredom correlates with the downward mobility of Bucharest's homeless

  O'Neill theorizes boredom as an enduring affect of globalization to provide a foundation from which to rethink the politics of alienation and displacement.

  The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (In Production - April 2017)

  The Politics of Boredom

  The Politics of Boredom

  This essay reflects upon the intimate entanglement of superfluity and boredom in post-Communist Bucharest

  Romania

  through an ethnographic analysis of an underground market for cheap sex. Inside a public restroom of a major transit station

  homeless men manage a deeply felt sense of boredom at the level of consumption

  trading in la petite mort in an effort to combat a deeply felt sense of la mort sociale. This essay takes this consumer-based response to radical exclusion as an opportunity to explore the subjective and affective dimensions of deepening poverty in a prolonged moment of neoliberal instability. The essay asks

  ultimately

  What kind of danger does boredom

  and the inclination to manage that boredom through consumer practices

  pose? This is a historical and ethnographic question that provides insight into the stiffening of class boundaries in Bucharest

  but also in other similarly positioned cities in Eastern Europe and the global south.

  Bored Stiff: Sex and Superfluity in a Time of Crisis Public

  From fascist prisons to Communist-era gulags

  Romania does not simply have a history of torture

  but also an existing infrastructure conducive to its practice. Romania

  human rights organizations have made clear

  hosted a number of “secret detention centers” used by the U.S. Government in its program of “extraordinary rendition

  ” whereby intelligence agents illegally rendered

  detained and tortured suspected terrorists. Both Romania’s gulags and its secret detention centers call to mind Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “the camp” – an extra-juridical space where human life is reduced to its bare form – which is why this article pivots on a historical comparison between the two. While both gulags and extraordinary rendition share material infrastructure

  and both were organized around the production and management of “bare life

  ” this article shows that rendition operates through a very different spatial logic than a gulag. As a result

  survivors of these different spatial iterations of “the camp” offer qualitatively different accounts of bare life. This observation allows ethnographers to extend Agamben’s analytical reach by spatially contextualizing the form

  relations and kinds of violence taking shape inside “camps

  ” allowing theorists to think about bare life as a historically specific phenomenon.

  Of Camps

  Gulags & Extraordinary Renditions: Infrastructural Violence in Romania

  Bored Stiff: Sex and Superfluity in a Time of Crisis

  Down & Then Out in Bucharest: Urban Poverty

  Governance & the Politics of Place in the Post-Socialist City

  This paper analyzes at the level of space the invention and management of homelessness in postsocialist cities. Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides shelter space in Bucharest

  Romania

  this paper foregrounds the political significance of placing homeless populations to better understand neoliberal governance as a set of spatially minded practices

  arguing (ultimately) that space is a key domain through which homeless populations become managed. This paper

  in the end

  focuses on ‘the place’ of homelessness to bring the dynamics of postsocialist liberalization into clearer relief.

  Down & Then Out in Bucharest: Urban Poverty

  Governance & the Politics of Place in the Post-Socialist City

  O'Neill