Reaching out, pulling in: creating citizens?
This sub-project focuses on the dilemmas of social work as an instance that mediates between the individual and society. It studies social work as it unfolds in interactions between social workers and homeless people in street-based outreach work. The aim is to provide knowledge about how governance strategies, knowledge and resistance shape the lived citizenship of the homeless.
The project contributes to the main project with knowledge about:
1. How governing in the form of care, housing strategies and motivational efforts shapes lived citizenship, and how this is in turn shaped by governance dilemmas relating to questions of autonomy and collectivity.
2. How spatial flows in the form of lay knowledge and professional knowledge contribute to the shaping of lived citizenship.
3. How the characteristics of outreach encounters as public spaces play a role in the shaping of lived citizenship.
This sub-project is theoretically and methodologically aligned with the main project proposal in that it applies a governmentality as interaction perspective combining a Foucauldian view on power, knowledge and subjectivity with interactionist approaches. On the one hand, this perspective includes attention to knowledge and power as intrinsically related, and on the other it focuses on how power is enacted in situated negotiations that take place in interactions. This approach allows an exploration of governance in terms of attempts to shape individuals, while emphasizing the manifold nature of agency, resistance and knowledge.
The main method is participant observation among outreach workers, which enables a detailed exploration of street-based outreach encounters that take place in public spaces over which outreach workers have no control – unlike spaces in regular people processing organizations. The observations are structured around the three main tasks involved in outreach work: contact making, initiating changes, and providing support to back up changes.
In line with the main project, documentary studies and group interviews with outreach workers are used to explore spatial flows. This is done with attention to national, regional, and global bodies of knowledge and regulation such as policies (e.g. Housing First strategies), professional methods (e.g. motivational interviewing) and lay knowledge (e.g. about welfare agencies).
The project is directed by postdoc Kristian Fahnøe
