Seeing like a shadow state: an ethnography of homeless street outreach in the USA

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do street outreach workers (SOWs) help govern homelessness? I present an ethnography from the USA to answer this question. Biopolitics is a mode of governance that manipulates fertility, morbidity, and/or mortality rates. The biopolitical turn in U.S. homeless policy obliges federally contracted SOWs – components of the shadow state – to perform morbidity assessments so local bureaucrats can manage exits from homelessness. Routine displacement of unhoused individuals generates surveillance gaps that SOWs fill by recruiting stakeholders with spatial information into their governing coalition. After finding a homeless contact, SOWs assess their morbidity in public spaces and upload this information to a centralized database that system managers use to monitor and manipulate population trends. Homeless contacts who cannot be located are uncounted, misclassified, and/or deprioritized for permanent housing assistance. The centrality of standardized health assessment highlights the salience of biopolitics to SOWs who enable local bureaucrats to see homeless subpopulations.