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Short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic work examining infrastructural failure, maintenance, and mediation in the US homeless services system, this paper investigates how frontline bureaucrats “intermediate” between the rigidity of the infrastructure and the messy social worlds of people experiencing homelessness.

Long abstract:

Government bureaucracies are fruitful sites for infrastructural analysis, full as they are of “the basic, the boring, the mundane, and all the mischievous work done behind the scenes” (Peters, 2015, 33). This is particularly the case of welfare state bureaucracies, systems that Tracey, Garcia, and Punzalan have called “infrastructures of last resort” (2023). As algorithms and other digital tools are increasingly integrated into these infrastructures, frontline workers' roles shift too. If previously, frontline bureaucracy consisted of flexibly administering “thick” rules; today, frontline bureaucrats must troubleshoot and work-around the failings of “thin” ones (Daston, 2022).

This paper presents ongoing ethnographic work examining infrastructural failure, maintenance, and mediation in the US homeless services system. In particular, this work investigates how frontline bureaucrats mediate between the rigidity of the infrastructure, and the messy social worlds of people experiencing homelessness. Drawing on theories of translation and articulation work, the paper proposes “intermediation” as a means of understanding the position, and the labor, of being in-between an infrastructure and the social worlds it intersects. As an analytic, intermediation illuminates how care through data and care for data intertwine and overlap. Through a series of illustrative examples, the paper demonstrates how intermediation powerfully shapes the impact of an infrastructure on the people who interact with it. It closes with a meditation on the paradoxical nature of intermediation: simultaneously providing vital support to an infrastructure, and seeking to escape it.