Paper short abstract

Ethnography of an NHS greenspace linked to homelessness care in Edinburgh shows how everyday violence makes longing a form of ethical practice. This exposes the limits of inclusion healthcare and opens speculative possibilities for care otherwise.

Paper long abstract

The Access Place (TAP) is a health facility in central Edinburgh that offers integrated “inclusion” services of housing, health, and social work for people experiencing homelessness with multiple and complex needs. This paper is situated in the NHS greenspace behind TAP, where gardening and food distribution projects operate as preventative community care programmes. Here, TAP patients speak about their lives and the structural violences that accompany inclusion healthcare, making the garden a threshold space: adjacent to biomedical care yet loosely regulated, where experiences of abandonment, longing, and bureaucratic exhaustion are felt, storied, and embodied.

Reflecting the social transience of the gardens, I draw on encounters with three TAP participants: Tree Man, whose ecological cosmologies render him “mad” within clinical frames; Roy, whose labour sustained the garden until he was banned from TAP grounds for violent outbursts; and Wolf, whose itinerant refusals of work, citizenship, and normative productivity disclose a longing for forms of care that exceed present institutional logics. Across their encounters with both the violences they endure and the violences they enact, notions of longing expose the affective and moral costs of inclusion healthcare in Scotland.

Bringing longing into conversation with everyday violence at TAP, I argue that longing-in-violence functions not as nostalgia nor individual therapeutic need, but as a future-oriented ethical practice: a refusal to be reduced to dysfunction or disdain, and a shared desire to be recognised as fully human. In this sense, longing makes visible the limits of inclusion whilst opening speculative possibilities for care otherwise.