Using Expressions of Past, Present and Future Homelessness Pathways as a Linguistic Resource in Meeting Interaction in a Low-Threshold Outpatient Clinic

Abstract

In homelessness research, a range of metaphors have been developed to understand homelessness and housing transitions at the margins. The article’s aim is to apply and combine the concept of pathways and ethnomethodological interaction research to illustrate how expressions of past, present and future homelessness and housing transitions are used as a linguistic resource of sense-making in a mental health and substance abuse work context. The naturally occurring meeting data from a low-threshold outpatient clinic for people with severe drug abuse and mental health problems located in a large Finnish city was collected during three months in 2012. The results point out the importance of the micro-level, i.e. face-to-face negotiations of the welfare workers and clients in finding ways out of homelessness. The text is methodologically explorative: it demonstrates one way of analysing expressions of pathways in interaction and in situ.

Keywords:

• Homelessness
• pathways
• interaction research
• ethnomethodology
• multi-party meetings

Acknowledgement

I want to thank Professor Kirsi Juhila and Marginalization-research group from the University of Tampere for valuable comments and support during the article process. The article was written as part of the work done in  research project "Geographies of home-based service interactions at the margings of welfare in Finland and Sweden (Academy of Finland).