Faltering care: why mothers experiencing homelessness in Dublin, Ireland, miss their childcare visits

This paper takes as its focus the caregiving efforts of a group of mothers in Dublin who were homeless, struggling with addiction, and separated from their children. It explores their ongoing orientation towards their distant children, in terms of their affective longings, practical actions, and moments of faltering, for despite yearning for an ongoing role in their children's lives, many of my interlocutors struggled to maintain a consistent caregiving engagement. The paper argues that the halting nature of my interlocutors' caring efforts does not preclude the sincerity of their affective concerns for their children, and that if we only judge care based on practical action and output, we overlook the tough realities of caregiving on the ground. Moreover, appreciating this fluctuating pattern of caregiving is necessary to understanding my interlocutors' oscillating trajectories through homelessness and substance use, and how these trajectories were shaped by their vacillating relationship with hope. This paper thus introduces the concept 'faltering care': care which encompasses conjoined moments of lapsed practical action and sustained affective concern, but which nonetheless reflects the care provider's hopeful reach towards leading a moral life.

Attending to Aliveness: Self-Harm, Body and World in Contexts of Urban Homelessness

The DSM-5 proposes that self-harm be recognized as a diagnostic category of mental disease, compared to its previous definition as a behavioral symptom. Based on fieldwork in London, I challenge this proposal by exploring the life-history of a homeless sex-worker and substance-user who practices self-cutting. By bringing phenomenological anthropology into conversation with psychoanalytic theory, this article provisionally re-conceptualizes self-harm as an ethics of self-reparation and existential affirmation in the face of extreme precarity. Approached as an agentive practice through which human beings reclaim "somethingness" by altering their bodily conditions, we can conceive self-harm in a way that is attentive to the situational conditions that shape existential pain, instead of reaching straight for the diagnostic toolkit. In taking self-harm as simultaneously a reaction to and a reflection on existential crisis-rather than a sui generis disorder-this paper situates such practices as a pluralized condition-of-world rather than a bounded pathology-of-mind.