Emergent subjectivity in caring institutions for teenagers

Abstract

We investigate how different mealtime situations help shape teenager and staff subjectivities in two Swedish residential care homes and a special school for girls and boys, 12-15 years old, with social, emotional, and behavioural difficulties. Three mealtime networks are analysed using concepts from actor-network theory, treating architectural space and artefacts, as well as teenagers and staff, as actors. The architectural spaces in the kitchen and dining room were first created for other purposes than residential care for troubled youth (i.e. a former farm, hospital, and preschool) and have been adapted to be more homelike while coping with housing and feeding 20 or more people. The original architectural spaces as well as activities before mealtimes were powerful actors in the mealtime network, causing different subjectivities to emerge in the translations. The subjectivities emerge in the first network as offenders/guards, in the second network as small children/nannies, and in the third network as guests/service staff. The different translations in the three meal networks create different mobilization opportunities for the teenagers concerning responsibility and normality.

The Continuation of Dwelling: Safety as a Situated Effect of Multi-Actor Interactions Within Extra-Care Housing in Sweden

“…The analytical concept of "space-ime trajectories" is operationalized in this study as a way of pointing to "how things are separated and bound together" (Murdoch, 1998, p. 359) in assemblings within the ECH, and the subjectification effects they produce (cf. Severinsson, & Nord, 2015).…”