Formalizing the Community & Practicing Collectivity
The search for collectivity in bureaucratic social work as a crucial site of encounter between local policy and community-based practices
In this research, Lieke Wissink follows the network that unfolds around community work practices - from the neighborhood, to community organizations, to local policy sites. It does so to gain insight into the relation between the institutional infrastructure of these practices on the one hand and the everyday encounters that are facilitated by community work organizations on the other. Lieke explores the role of bureaucratic practices for the relations that are made in the network of community work practices and the ways of living together that can be imagined, dismissed or challenged within.
What
The "community" is often held up as the place to develop the social resilience that can meet current and upcoming societal challenges. But what exactly the community is in everyday life is often elusive. This makes it an ongoing quest how to formalize the community on paper and to design policies in support of these communities subsequently. Within the community-work-network exist diverse understandings of the community but also of how to live together in a (more) socially just way within that community. A lack of alignment between "policy" and "practice" is a common explanation for this. But a crucial place of encounter between these sites, often depicted as a dichotomy, often gets overlooked. It is exactly this encounter that this research focuses on: the paperwork and related practices that aim to formalize the community-work landscape. These can be subsidy forms, annual reports, policy documents and more. These sites of (paper) encounters are referred to here as "bureaucratic social work".
Question
By focusing on "bureaucratic social work" the knowledge gap that exists in this encounter is addressed. Frequently dismissed as nothing more than an unnecessary waste of time, this research recognizes bureaucratic social work as a normative practice. Keeping the hopes on community work in mind, this project asks how relationships in the community-work-network are formed, what the role of bureaucratic social work as a site of encounter therein is, and which and whose visions on collectivity are shaped or rendered invisible along the way.
How
This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork. The field however is no demarcated location but connects practices in multiple places by tracing the relations in the community-work-network. Besides participant observation, insights are drawn from semi-structured and informal interviews, document analysis and a mapping of the material infrastructures.