Narrating Homelessness: the Construction, Interpretation, and Reframing of Unhoused Experience in Bureaucracies of Care

Abstract

Working against the upswing of the United States homelessness epidemic, social workers face an ever-increasing brunt of bureaucratic regulation, obligation, and contradiction as they seek to forward their homeless clients’ access to housing. When the experience of homelessness exceeds bureaucratic legibility, it is through narrative construction, interpretation, and reframing that social workers make meaning of the excess. This thesis seeks to interrogate the social worker’s practice of narrative construction and reframing as it scales across personal, interpersonal, and institutional registers. Pushing against bureaucracy’s reductionist force while operating within it, social workers turn to narrative as a means not only of expressing the inexpressible, but with the hopes of expanding the possibilities of what bureaucracy can (and should) assimilate. Spread across community mental health clinics, psychiatric facilities, and homeless encampments, this ethnography follows social workers as they mediate between the intimacies of homeless experience and the primacy of bureaucratic regulation. Exploring how case managers both adhere to and subvert the treatment plan paradigm, Part 1 explores the ways in which social workers reimagine institutional treatment plans to forge cohesive “client narratives” capable of accommodating both homeless experience and bureaucratic regulation. Part 2 interrogates how social workers subsequently mobilize these client narratives as they navigate institutional deviance, while Part 3 addresses the gap between experience and narrative as social workers seek to reconcile client experiences with institutional narratives of homelessness. Questioning whether this gap between homeless experience and clinical narrative can ever be fully reconciled, in the conclusion I turn to the homeless community’s own means of structuring and expressing experience as a generative ground not only for social work and homeless outreach, but ethnographic writing itself.