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Paper short abstract

In de-escalation expertise, the body figures as an important site of expressiveness. Through ethnographic engagement with de-escalation in German health and welfare services, I discuss how notions of disability, debility, and incapacity inform uses of non-verbal communication in this field.

Paper long abstract

In many facilities providing health and social welfare services in Germany, de-escalation is trained, mandated and practiced as a professional approach towards aggressive and potentially violent behavior. Through de-escalation trainings, staff learns how to interact with patients and clients in tense and potentially dangerous situations. The body figures in these encounters as an important and at times privileged site of expressiveness, which can be read through registers of universality as well as registers of difference. In this contribution, I ask how notions of disability, debility and exceptional states are interwoven with verbal and nonverbal communication in de-escalation expertise. My ethnographic data centers on de-escalation trainings for staff in health and welfare settings and on de-escalation practices in Berlin emergency accommodations for unhoused people. (De-)escalating bodies in this field are understood as bodies under stress, with (temporarily) altered cognitive and sensorial capacities. Categories of physical, mental or cognitive difference underpin these understandings in several ways, linking to permanent or temporary differences in perception, behavior and capacity. Stress in de-escalation expertise connotes danger, as it is understood to compromise the capacity for self control and rational thought, but also a condition to be cared for in order to mitigate risk. These registers of care and security, I show, also come with different knower-positionalities, ranging from detached and universalizing readings of what is often called body language, to the body as a device for making contact alongside, or in lieu of, verbal language.