Abstract
Based on an ethnographic survey conducted in services for the homeless in French-speaking Switzerland, this paper examines street-level social workers’ struggles between the implementation of official policies and their direct work with people. Beyond their common condition of homelessness, people looking for shelter are a very heterogeneous group: undocumented migrants and foreign workers rub shoulders with poor, local pensioners, or with persons suffering from drug addiction or mental illness. Guided by national and international residence and labour legislation, local authorities and institutions have their own policies – more or less strict in their exclusion of poor migrants – regarding the legitimate beneficiaries of a place in the emergency accommodation system. In this article, we analyse the encounters of street-level social workers with homeless people and examine the practical, value-based and ethical dilemmas they face, as well the use of their discretionary power in making more - or less - appropriate shelter available for destitute migrants.
About the authors
Béatrice Bertho is a socio-anthropologist and senior research fellow at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO). She completed her PhD on social policies and gender in Burkina Faso and is currently coordinating research on the engagement of girls in football teams in Cameroon and Senegal. In addition to these topics, she is currently developing her research and teaching interests in local Swiss social policies in relation to homelessness and migration.
Hélène Martin is an anthropologist, professor of gender studies at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO), and co-responsible of the Gender and Social Work Competence Network. In recent years, she has been working on the construction of the body and sexuality in an intersectional approach, with particular interest in the neoliberal injunctions of selfentrepreneurship. For the past two years, she has also been engaged in research on homelessness: the social treatment of extreme poverty leads her to reflect on vulnerabilities constructed by intersecting logics of coloniality, class and gender.
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