“Getting placed” in time

Abstract

This study describes one caseworker’s construction of responsibility through her interactions with three homeless clients in an urban homeless shelter, revealing the significant impact of the shelter, shelter policy, and personal contexts on the construction of responsibility in talk. It explores how responsibility is constructed through a series of discursive choices, including deontic modality, personal pronouns, expressions of time and space, and accounts. These discursive choices expose the ways in which the caseworker’s responsibility talk changes depending on the category of client. Specifically, the study compares the caseworker’s responsibility talk with an undocumented homeless client to her responsibility talk with long-term staying clients. Given policy mandates to place long-term clients (in shelter nine months or longer) more quickly, responsibility talk with these clients as they near the nine-month benchmark is more aggressive. The study shows how the caseworker’s talk with the new undocumented client surprisingly resembles her talk with the long-term clients nearing the nine-month benchmark. She discursively treats this new undocumented client like persisting ones. ‘Imagined time’ and ‘imagined space’ are introduced to aid in describing the projected, future non-compliance of a new undocumented client as established in the caseworker’s responsibility talk.

When the Street Disappears: Eminent Domain, Redevelopment, and the Dissociative State

“…Rather than openly communicating its intention to seize property, de‐map streets, and move people, the state instead relied on (1) the ambiguity of its partnership with the developer, (2) the narrative framings of the project and of the public by the media, and (3) the efforts of project opponents to articulate the threat of eminent domain. In this dissociative context, the state successfully implemented eminent domain in the absence of what Lipsky () called street‐level bureaucrats, often shown to be the front‐line government employees who carry out and enforce laws and policy (Hornberger ; Matarese ; Trinch and Berk‐Seligson .) We draw on cultural anthropology and discourse analysis to reconstruct how, during this detached state of “the state,” information disseminated about the project at first rendered those living and working in the area invisible, and then created a public story of individual choices made as private business transactions, rather than one in which people were pressured to give up their land to a developer.…”