Paper short abstract:

We analyze the existence of a foundling room in Holland, where anonymous child abandonment is illegal. The room is a social experiment, where different accountabilities are enacted in the public eye. We show how this public enactment creates and legitimates new ontologies and practices.

Paper long abstract:

Anonymous child abandonment is illegal in the Netherlands, yet yearly an average of 6 infants are unsafely abandoned (NIDAA). Some do not survive. To address this problem, a non-governmental organization created a foundling room, where one can abandon a baby anonymously.

We analyze this room as a place of various surveillances and accountabilities. We focus on the links between the room's material affordances and surrounding practices. In our analysis we conceive of the room as an experimental infrastructure (Jensen and Morita 2015), which reconfigures the field and gives rise to "new ontologies" (Pickering 2008). Although the room is meant to be an alternative to state-channel abandonment, its legitimation is its claim of encouraging control through surveillance. Its materialities are placed strategically to avoid anonymity, or (as its mere existence) to suggest it. As a temporary public experiment, accounting for its practices is a balance of seeing and not seeing. The room's 'ways of seeing' legitimate its existence to the public and the law, while its 'ways of unseeing' attract the people it tries to reach. All the while the legal debate over the room's existence carves out space for new practices.

Using an ethnographic approach, we conduct interviews, observations and archival research. Our goal is to show empirically how accountability is being done, challenged and remade as a public experiment and how socio-material practices of regulation emerge. We contribute to debates on materiality and control/surveillance, as well as on spaces for transformative accountabilities.