Occupation Bedbug: Or, the Urgency and Agency of Professional Pragmatism

Abstract

This essay draws on fieldwork with American social workers, whose primary charge is to engage what they view as particularly recalcitrant human problems and populations. All the while, these workers find themselves in intensive engagements with bedbugs, which have recently infested the American imaginary, as well as the destitute sites of American social work. As every professional effort at elimination is met with bedbugs’ seeming multiplication, eradicating bedbugs comes to be understood as both professional responsibility and practical impossibility—yet another example that themagnitude of the problems with which social workers are charged exceeds their abilities to resolve them. And yet these professionals neither succumb to burnout nor suffer a sustained sense of futility. Rather, bedbugs help them cultivate a sustaining occupational ethic, one that resonates with American systems theories and American Pragmatism. More specifically, human-bedbug engagements inspire a working formulation of agency that acknowledges the efficacies of non-human actors, understands human intention as the framing of, rather than fuel for what actually happens, and privileges the means over the ends of (professional) labor. With a focus on how human-bedbug engagements contribute to the development of folk theories of agency, this article demonstrates the fluidity with which social actors think about the possibilities for effective, meaningful (re)action and thereby contributes to the anthropology of agency.