Govern of conducts, risk and homeless care in Brazil: Reflections

Abstract

Abstract In this study, inspired by governmental studies on Foucault, Nikolas Rose, Deborah Lupton and Mitchell Dean, we develop considerations about the ways through which the concept of risk has been operating within the homeless health care that live in some metropolitan areas of Brazil. In this paper, we discuss risk us as a moral and political technology that produces patterns to experience and to analyze reality.: Risk as a technology that has an important role in governing conducts and production of subjectivity. We argue that whilst health policy determines healthy ways of life, its effect can contribute to active surveillance (by the health care experts and by the homeless persons) that stigmatizes and divide society around the concept o 'normality' informed, between others, by epidemiological 'evidence'. Albeit the risks associated with risk-based technologies to build up a surveillance net and standardization that reinforces submissive ways of life, we find out on our ethnographic study within the services - named 'Street Surgery'- that offers transdisciplinary healthcare for people living in the streets of Campinas, Brazil, that those technologies strikes itself continuously with practices of counter-conducts by the homeless that resist the normalization of their lives and point out to other ways of producing life and care. Others ways that, is important to say, have been very influential to change the medical and other professional experts practices of the 'Street Surgery' of Campinas and had been very important to academic researchers that have been questioning hegemonic discourses, arrangements and practices of care on the Primary Health System. Key messages Risk-based approach to health can lead to the reinforcement of submissive ways of life, incompatible with a broader concept of health. For the development of a compromised and humanized care, it's important to take into consideration the.