Engineering Ethics: Techniques and Technologies in the Moral Economy of Homeless Social Services

• In Event: Becoming “Data-Driven”: Burgeoning Data Cultures and Liminality in Civil Service - II

Abstract

This paper examines the moral economies of contemporary United States homeless social services in Houston, Texas as socio-historical developments that are managed and reproduced through technological processes such as lists, surveys, and data-collection. Critiquing the frequently positivist view of the development of social work, this paper argues that workers socially engineer and maintain a model of homeless policy that aligns with normative moralities and political realities to construct an “innovative” moral economy of service and care. Techniques such as the Houston Housing List and the Point-in-Time Count, and their data-driven justification for federal funding, serve to reinforce themitical interactions between social workers and homeless subjects. The paper utilizes both historical and qualitative research methods, such as sustained observation and participant engagement, and interviews with administrators, workers, and clients in two homelessness organizations in Houston, Texas, to establish a view of the constantly re-evaluative world of social service policy development. This paper offers inroads to understanding the societal management of transient populations within the context of neoliberal techniques of governance, new ethical configurations based on evidence-based-practices, and how dominant moral systems emerge from these processes. Future research should examine how homeless subjects navigate through these social service providers’ techniques, and how they make sense of providers’ efforts.

Author

• Jolen Martinez, Rice University