Spirals of Care: Resisting Paternalism and Palliation in Housing First Homeless Services

• In Event: 50617 - Welfare States in Practice: Care, Control, and Inequality

Abstract

As realized and threatened resource deprivation grows in the United States, so does the
imperative to transform our system of poverty governance. According to sociologists,
paternalism and palliation pervade the distribution of welfare, functioning to further marginalize
those in need versus facilitate their self-actualization. In this piece, I ask how feasible it is for
frontline bureaucrats to resist dominant modes of neoliberal welfare governance by embodying
care that lacks paternalism and palliation. To explore this question, I center an ethnographic
study of case managers who work with chronically unhoused people in a nonprofit committed to
meeting needs on clients’ terms. My findings demonstrate this organizational ideology was
reinforced by case managers’ personal struggles securing welfare, and their ongoing witnessing
of clients’ suffering. Beginning with attempts to meet all needs clients presented with, case
managers’ care came up against constraints that stemmed from funders, other resource holders,
and clients themselves, which resulted in their sporadic adoption of paternalism and palliation
that became more frequent over time. As such, I theorize frontline welfare bureaucrat resistance
as spirals of care that end in dominant modes of neoliberal welfare governance after many failed
attempts to meet client needs otherwise.

Author

• Alexa Damaska, Boston College