Contact : E. Lemener

How to help homeless people in a social emergency setting? This is the practical question which guides the work of the Samusocial de Paris’s outreach team (EMA). Doing relief work (feeding, housing, clothing, and caring) should not be reduced to a functionalist or market analysis (in simple terms of supply and demand).  Helping homeless people involves legitimating a provoked street encounter by night. It means to discover the right distance between caring and humiliating. It implies to win a person’s trust, who is isolated and in need of “re-socialization”. Beyond a priori criticism stances about symbolic violence imposed upon dominated from the dominated, the issue is to characterize a specific know-how and to observe how an attachment can occur, in situ. The analysis deals with the framing operations (in the meaning of E. Goffman) performed at the same time (for the homeless as for the outreach team) and generating (or not) a common focus of attention. To study this very media-related work, but not very visible or much recognized, a double method has been used: the observation in situ (during about thirty nights) and the linguistic analysis based on interaction’ recordings. Thus, a new issue, both theoretical and methodological, is underlined: the combination of linguistic discipline (pragmatism, communication ethnography, conversational analysis) and sociological ethnography.

Protocol

Report

Articles

"La maraude à la lumière du refus d’hébergement : tensions et cadrages dans l’urgence sociale", Gardella E., Le Méner E., in Berger M., Cefaï D., Gayet C. (dir.), Du civil au politique. Ethnographies du vivre ensemble, Bruxelles, P.I.E., 2010 [sous presse].

"Enquêter sur un dispositif d’urgence sociale. Les maraudes auprès de sans-abri à Paris", Cefaï D., Gardella E., Le Méner E., in Cantelli F., Roca i Escoda M., Stavo-Debauge J., Pattaroni L., (dir.), Sensibilités pragmatiques. Enquêter sur l’action publique, Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, Francfort, New York, Oxford, Vienne, Peter Lang, 2009, p. 39-52.