Place and the uncanny in child protection social work: exploring findings from an ethnographic study

Abstract

This paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of child protection social workers in Britain, which explored social workers’ experiences of and practices in space and place. It draws on data from interviews with practitioners and observations that were carried out as social workers moved around the places (the town, estates, streets and areas around service users’ homes) where they worked. It focuses on the significance of a particular affective experience, the uncanny, which social workers evoked in many of their accounts of these places. The paper introduces recent conceptualisations of space, affect and the uncanny before going on to consider data from the interviews. The following themes are explored: the relationships between the intimate spaces of service users' homes and the neighbourhoods in which they were located; social workers' accounts of feeling vulnerable in public and open spaces; social workers' experiences of feeling unsettled by apparently mundane features of neighbourhood spaces. The paper draws on critical engagements with the uncanny to consider its significance for child protection social work practice in Britain and its consequences in terms of social workers’ potential to work in emplaced and locally sensitive ways.

Place and the uncanny in child protection social work: exploring findings from an ethnographic study

Most recent literature about place in social work has taken one of three different approaches. Some writers have employed psychological concepts to understand place, often through adaptations of ideas already familiar to social workers (see discussions of ‘place attachment’ such as Possick, 2006; Jack, 2010) or through the use of approaches from behavioural geography to understand our responses to our environment (e.g. Wilkinson and Bissell, 2006). The spiritual significance of place has also started to be explored in social work literature, particularly in relation to ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ forms of knowledge (e.g. Zapf, 2005; Galloway et al., 2008). A third approach to space and place can be found in Ferguson’s work, which develops a phenomenological discussion of social workers’ experiences of spaces and foregrounds the central significance of mobility in child protection work (Ferguson 2004; 2009a; 2009b; 2010a). There is, therefore, an increasing engagement in social work with sociological and geographical conceptualisations of place but with some limitations. Studies concerned with practice have tended to focus on a restricted number of sites such as service users’ homes, social work offices and, for Ferguson at least, social workers’ cars. While some of the authors have considered how social workers see the wider areas in which service users live (for example de Montigny, 1995; Ferguson, 2010b; 2011), they still tend to consider these places in terms of social workers’ experiences as they pass through them in their short journeys from car to front door.

In contrast, community social work literature in Britain has shown a long-standing interest in neighbourhoods and other forms of locally defined place (Teater and Baldwin, 2012; for examples seeHolman, 1979; National Institute for Social Work, 1982; Smale, 1988). The shift in policy towards personalisation and co-production of support in adults’ services in Britainhas seen renewed interest in the role of local communities, neighbourhoods and networks in social care (Rhodes and Broad, 2011; Broad, 2015). In addition, some critiques of defensive and bureaucratised children’s social work have proposed a reorientation towards local communities and places instead (Holland et al., 2011; Cottam and James, 2013;Featherstone, White and Morris, 2014). Most of this literature suggests that there is currently a dearth of place-sensitive, locally engaged children’s social work in Britain. While the risk averse, information systems driven nature of child protection social work in Britain distinguishes it from practice in many other countries, research conducted elsewherehas concluded that social workers’ practice might still be grounded on restricted conceptions of and engagements with local places (see for example Narhi’s 2002 discussion of social workers’ views about neighbourhoods in Finland).

This paper seeks to consider the uncannyas a feature of social workers’ talk about and affective experience of the places where they work, which is likely to be significant in understanding the barriers to more place sensitive, locally engaged practice in children’s social work in Britain. It draws on findings from an ethnographic study of children’s safeguarding social workers’ experiences of space and place more broadly, which has led to insights about other features of social workers’ experiences of and practices in space (seeJeyasingham, 2014; 2016).

The research, carried out as part of my study for a doctorate, took place in 2011-2012. Ethical approval was granted from a university ethical approval committee and a regional committee which considered ethical and research governance matters for the two local authorities in which the research took place. The study comprised observations of social workers in a social work team in each local authority, over the course of three months at each site, with the aim of understanding further how social workers negotiated space in their everyday practice and how they talked about spaces and places during their work and in research interviews. Observations took place in social workers’ offices, supervision sessions, professionals meetings related to child protection and domestic violence and in social workers’ cars and service users’ homes when social workers visited them. As well as the observations, I carried out semi-structured interviews with those participants who were available and willing to take part (24 participants out of a total of 46 who were observed), which took place in separate rooms in social workers’ offices and focused on their practices in space and their expressed thoughts about the places (offices, homes, neighbourhoods, local authorities etc) in which they worked. I also carried out six mobile interviews with social workers – three in each of the two sites. In these interviews I asked participants to show me around the places where they worked by driving or walking with me whilst talking about their work and the place more generally. In doing this, I aimed to explore how social workers’ movement through and immersion in places might be significant for how those places come to be experienced and represented (see Anderson, 2004; Buscher et al., 2011 and Shaw and Holland, 2014 for discussions of walking as a mobile method of research).

I made detailed fieldnotes during and after observations, while interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed except in two circumstances where participants were not comfortable with this. The fieldnotes, transcripts and notes from interviews that were not transcribed were then analysed methodically through manual coding, from which emerged key themes relating to the production of space in practice. Data was anonymised at the point where notes were made and interviews transcribed, with pseudonyms being used for all participants and places (neighbourhood and street names were replaced with the names of ferns). Data was stored securely in accordance with ethical approval.

This paper presents findingsfrom mobile interviews, interviews at offices and fieldnotes from my observations of and conversations with social workers while moving around the place in which they worked. It examines the uncanny resonances of social workers’ talk about the places where they worked. The uncanny was not an initial focus of the study but it emerged as one of a small number of affective frames through which social workers presented spaces and spoke about making sense of them (others included delight - particularly in relation to certain small children - and disgust, and these will be explored in a forthcoming paper). Theseaffective frames were not necessarily apparent in the practice contexts that I observed (such as supervision sessions and meetings with service users or other professionals) but they are considered here because they are likely to be significant for the judgements that social workers make in their practice.

Uncanny resonances were apparent in interviews and observations across both sites but in the paper I focus on data from one of the two research sites, a town referred to in this paper as Lumberton. This allows me to consider further the similarities and differences between the ways that the same places were experienced and represented by different participants.

Affect is a key focus of a body of recent work in cultural geography that has come to be termed non-representational theory or NRT (Thrift, 2008). In NRT, affect is distinguished from both emotions and sensations in that it ‘does not reside in an object or body, but surfaces from somewhere in between' (Adey, 2008a: p. 439). Lorimer’s (2008) review of developments in NRT notes the differing ways that it has been theorised but identifies a unifying aspect of this body of literature as the wish to locate affect in the environment rather than solely within sensate bodies. Affect is therefore a way of understanding bodies, things, motivations and movements as aspects of wider spaces and places, rather than features of individuated agents. Prioritising the human subject as the default site and scale for understanding feelings, sensations or gestures is questioned. Instead, places and their resonances, the ways in which material spaces intrude into and affect experience, are prioritised as focuses for investigation.While NRT questions the importance that has been attached to the symbolic in discussions of space and place, it does not seek simply to attend to concrete features of space. The material and non-material are not seen as opposing registers of experience; instead, NRT literature argues that a fuller engagement with the material requires a deeper understanding of its immaterial dimensions. Latham and McCormack (2004) explore how materiality emergesprocessuallythrough interactions between the material and non-material: the ‘complex realities of apparently stable objects [...] are always held together and animated by processes excessive of form and position’ (2004: p. 705). So, in order to understand materiality, we need to consider the associations and processes through which materials come into being. This focus enables NRT to examine those aspects of spaces and places that cannot be apprehended through solely technical means but which notions of genius locior place attachment tend to frame in ways that assume bounded human subjects. Affect, in the pared down terms through which it is understood in NRT, is a way of engaging with this interaction between material and immaterial.

Place and the uncanny

The discussionabove suggests a consideration of place and the uncanny that focuses not just on how places are represented or constructedthrough talk and text but also the role of affective experience in the production of places through bodies moving through them. In this approach, the uncanny is located between subjective experiences and places themselves, produced out of interactions between material features, talk and the immaterial.

The uncanny has been understood in critical literature in a number of ways: the experience of something as both familiar and strange; a response to things that are inanimate but seem as if they are alive; the simultaneous sense of feeling out of place in the present and haunted by past occurrences. It might be the eerie feeling that comes withthe intruding sense that we are not the subject who looks but instead the object of an unknown other's gaze (Cixous, 1976). It might be the sense that something is almost exactly as it should be, but not quite - as Mori (2012) suggests,dead bodies, life-like robots or the masked figures in Noh theatre seem uncanny to the extent that these things look right but do not move when we expect them to, or do not move as they should. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud (1919) presented it as the jarring sensation that comes when something familiar is encountered in an unexpected context, or vice versa. Freud was interested in the idea of a doppleganger, a common figure in Gothic literature who appears to be the exact likeness of a central character but who brings a sense of menace or evil to the story. The uncanny might therefore be impossible to identify but, nevertheless, makes itself felt through a creeping sense of disquiet.

Collins and Jervis (2008) argue that the uncanny should be seen as a distinctively modern sensibility, arising as the inevitable reverse of the priority given to rational explanation in modernity. It is felt in relation to features of social experience that previously could have been explained through reference to religion or the supernatural but, while such systems of belief might once have provided ways of making sense of the inexplicable, with the uncanny these uncertainties persist in the form of particular kinds of affective experience - a feeling of unease or the sense of something both indistinct and troubling. Academic writing about the uncanny has proliferated since the 1980s and Ffytche (2012) argues that we can now talk of ‘uncanny theory’, suggesting that the notion has had a profound impact on disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, with new approaches to interpretation that aim to accentuate uncanny aspects of their research object rather than seeking to impose a determinate analysis. In this way the uncanny becomes not just a focus of research (such as work on ghosts, vampires and zombies) but a tool for scholarly enquiry itself.Chattopadhyay (2010), for example, suggests that the uncanny offers ‘a useful device for approaching the methodological need to reconcile what we can and cannot experience’ (p.649). Engaging with the uncanny, indeed, recreating it in academic enquiry is claimed as a method of phenomenological exploration that sustains a sense of the indeterminate, opening up broader ways of engaging with the world.

Writing about the uncanny has tended to draw on a variety of sources including Freud’s(1919) essay, the psychoanalytic discussions that it later inspired and Derrida’s (1994) engagement with Heidegger and haunting. The idea of place is central to each of these, with the focus of Freud’s paper being das unheimliche (which can be translated as either uncanny or unhomely), while Derrida’s work is concerned with Heidegger’s understanding of dwelling or being in the world. Not surprisingly then, there has been a considerable amount of interest in the uncanny in those disciplines concerned with space and place such as cultural geography, architecture and urban studies (e.g. Battista et al., 2005; Hook, 2005; Donald, 1999).

Findings: social workers’ accounts of places

The following discussion seeks to explore the uncanny as it arose in social workers’ talk about the places where they worked. It is important to provide some orienting information about the place where these social workers were based.Lumberton is an expanded town where new development has been promoted through government policy and, as such, it shares many features of the new towns that were developed in Britain in the 20th century. There is a mix of social and private housing and a relatively high level of social diversity, with some affluent neighbourhoods and several areas of significant social deprivation. There are also higher than average levels of fear of crime in many areas (Communities and Local Government, 2011) but the town does not have exceptional social problems.

The use of mobile interviews as a method enabled participants to construct accounts of places that were both verbal and visual and thatdeveloped across time and space. For example, participants often spoke about places while we were approaching them in ways that created a degree of tension over time between them knowing and me seeing places, and this often had the effect of suggesting intimate and privileged knowledge. They stopped their cars outside certain places, presenting particular profiles and perspectives of those places while talking about them. Sometimes they suggested that we leave the car and walk through certain areas,and the affective experiences of such movements are ones that I aim both to evoke and consider, to the extent that theyare involved in producing place in certain ways (Lefebvre, 1991; Jeyasingham, 2014). In what follows I focus on three elements of social workers' talk about spaces and places, each of which contributed to a sense of the uncanny. These are:

  • The relationships between the intimate spaces in which social workers encountered service users and the neighbourhoods where they were located;
  • Social workers' accounts of becoming aware that they were being watched and, more generally, feeling vulnerable in public and open spaces;
  • Social workers' experiences of feeling unsettled by apparently mundane features of neighbourhood spaces.

Drawing relationships between intimate spaces and neighbourhoods

During the mobile interviews, each of the social workers described small, specific areas in vivid and definitive terms. For instance, Jonathanʼs descriptions of the Autumn estate were deeply resonant. His tour was organised in such a way that it constructed the estate as a significant destination, a 'very important but difficult [place] to find', later described as a 'very deprived area' then, when we finally turned on to the estate's service road: 'This is the famous Autumn estate'. While showing me around the estate, he drove the car into a cul de sac, pulled up and stated: ‘This is Clinton’s Wood. It’s quite a frightening place to come to’. He went on to tell me about two cases that he had in Clinton’s Wood. One featured violence and, while he did not suggest a causal relationship, it seemed from Jonathan's description that aspects of the violence resonated for him in the environment. In the other case, a woman had moved back and forth between relationships with two different men in neighbouring flats until, in the end, the three of them moved in together. He presented this as an ironic story but also one that communicated something about a dearth of moral expectations on the estate; something which,his account suggested,also resonated in the built environment itself. He commented on the lack of privacy in Clinton’s Wood, his perception that the flats were not clearly residential in appearance, the difficulty in distinguishing fronts and backs of the homes, the fact that some of the flats had garages while none of the residents owned cars – something which he said was ‘odd’. While he said that he felt frightened coming to Cinton’s Wood, Jonathan’s description of the place emphasised instead a sense of things being disordered or out of place.