Ethnography of a Relationship Between Social Workers and Homeless People: The Educational Function of the Research and the Mediation Role of the Researcher

This contribution focuses on two themes: the role of the ethnographer as a mediator between academic world and social world; the educational function of the research expressed in the interactions between social workers, homeless people, and researcher. The paper refers to a doctoral research project (2018–2019) that has as main objective the exploration of the relationship between homeless people and social workers in a city in Southern Italy. This relationship can be defined as structural, in terms of a persistent pattern between social positions, because it represents an asymmetrical power relationship aimed at promoting change. The relative-relational approach to the study of poverty considers its symbolic-relational element as a determining dimension: the definition of the poor depends on the social and cultural context of reference and, consequently, changes in the times that policies and social workers have. According to the theory of gift, inequality of position is a necessary condition for achieving the exchange that makes relations between people burn and grow. However, what constitutes inequality is the absence of reciprocity. The main questions guiding the research are: how policies are influencing the context and the organisation of services at a street level; how actors perceive and describe themselves and their relationship; whether there is reciprocity and how this affects their lives and the construction of knowledge around the issue of social relations. Thus, the research looks at the organisation of the network and the places where this relationship takes shape, the stories of the actors involved, their experiences of the relationship and the meaning they attribute to it. The adopted approach is adapted to combine urban and organisational ethnography with the study of networks. The subjects involved are institutional and street social workers, homeless people, and city volunteers. The fieldwork (February 2019–February 2020) integrates four types of data collection: observations, ethnographic conversation, in-depth interviews, and focus groups. The main findings we found concern: the stratification of homeless people that the tiered model of the service system tends to reproduce; the distance between role and self that social workers and homeless people experience differently; the presence of reciprocity at a micro level of interaction and the absence of reciprocity at a macro level of institutional relations.