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Paper short abstract:

This paper considers outreach workers who “tinker” within programmatic logics that obscure conditions of homelessness and mental illness. We argue that “visibilizing” complexity includes a “political clinical work” that incorporates “irrationality” into interventions, at their creaky interstices.

Paper long abstract:

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, homelessness, and its conjunction with severe mental illness, has become an increasingly visible social crisis. Yet, public policy interventions into this social crisis often take the form of disciplinary measures, obscuring the matrix of conditions that make homelessness and mental illness entrenched problems in the United States, and under-resourcing programs designed to care for these persons.

This study describes the work of a set of outreach workers addressing homelessness in Los Angeles, considering how frontline practitioners create an ethic of care for homeless and mentally ill individuals sometimes with and at other times “counter” (Davis 2018, Pinto 2019) to the programmatic logics they work within. We consider how these practitioners “tinker” (Mol, Moser, Pols 2010) within the interactional contexts in which they operate, working in ways they perceive as effective and ethical/just/caring. At times, they exhibit a kind of necessary “crankiness” (Slaby, Mühlhoff, Wüschner 2017), positioned at the at the creaky “interstices” (Lovell 2007) of programmatic logics.

We argue that in order to “visibilize” kinds of psychic subjectivity generally “invisibilized” within the American social welfare system, these practitioners practice a kind of “political clinical work” (Giordano 2014), which institutes forms of “irrationality” not specifically sanctioned by programmatic logics. By doing so, practitioners operate in ways at times “commensurable” and other times “incommensurable” (Matza 2018) with American capitalist logics, as they are embedded in the social welfare programs we consider.