The state of homelessness: fragmentation and the will to care in metropolitan England

Tawfic, Simon (2022) The state of homelessness: fragmentation and the will to care in metropolitan England. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

‘Ending homelessness’ is an often-expressed public good in the UK. Cycles of homelessness crises endure despite a committed combination of governmental and charitable agencies whose charter is precisely to end these. Government austerity policies have amplified the atomisation of an industry of competing homeless organisations whose survival depends on funding from an increasingly unpredictable state. Further still, this influx of insecure funding into the homeless industry is accompanied by the ongoing state-initiated depletion and residualisation of sustainable accommodation. This thesis explores the interface of frontline workers and their beneficiaries in this ‘homeless industry’: the assemblage of churches, night shelters, advice drop-ins, day centres, council officials and outreach workers who rely largely on government funding to ‘tackle homelessness’. It conjoins the perspectives of its workers who are charged with ‘firefighting’ on behalf of those beneficiaries who make personalised claims on them to alleviate homelessness. By highlighting these perspectives, it reveals how the industry’s seeming pursuit of the same public good is in fact experienced as fragmented, contested and contradictory by workers and beneficiaries alike. It explores the hierarchical division of labour within this industry, the efforts of charity managers and frontline workers alike to maintain the unique brand personalities of their respective organisations, how frontline workers make difficult moral judgments about who is deserving of assistance, the mutual dependencies between charity workers and beneficiaries and the ethical labour of successful aid-seekers who endeavour to make new homes in circumstances that threaten to create renewed homelessness. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research that concluded at the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic, it argues that the work demanded of, and embraced by, the homeless industry represents an endeavour to ‘fix’ the wider capitalist crises of housing in England and governmental crises of legitimacy. It suggests that the post-austerity resurgence in the fight to end homelessness struggles with – and often perversely reinforces – the British state’s renewed claims to legitimacy through caring for its citizenry. Situated on the ‘shop floor’ of an aid industry at home, this thesis recasts the business of ending homelessness as a fraught labour of care which the British state both sponsors and ultimately renders impossible.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2022 Simon Tawfic
Library of Congress subject classification:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Sets:	Departments > Anthropology
Supervisor:	James, Deborah and Koch, Insa
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4663

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