Resisting welfare conditionality: constraint, choice and dissent among homeless migrants

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways in which welfare conditionality impacts upon homeless migrants in the UK. Legal status, eligibility requirements and behavioural controls determine access to benefits, housing and State assistance, compounding the precarity of homeless migrants who are situated at the interstices of multiple (and competing) systems. The chapter looks how specific conditions both constrain the choices of homeless migrants and how efforts at behavioural change are resisted. Using data from a study of Polish rough sleepers in Scotland, this chapter asks: To what extent is non-participation a consequence of passivity or a feature of active choice? In what ways do those facing extreme precarity and constrained choice resist welfare conditionality? The study argues that for some rough sleepers, homelessness can be a form of resistance to eligibility and behavioural conditions attached to welfare and sleeping rough can be an act of dissent to forms of State control.

Providing an Authentic Voice? Understanding Migrant Homelessness through Critical Poetic Inquiry

“…Such deficit-based, 'pathological' models of disadvantage overlook the capacity of individuals to exercise personal choice, preference and values in even the most constrained of circumstances. Elsewhere, I have pointed to a certain blindness to agency in conversations about homelessness (Serpa 2019). In a similar vein, Aldeia's (2013) governmentality analysis of homelessness research revealed a 'dominant regime of truth', constituted by two separate (but complementary) approaches to investigating the phenomenon: quantification and 'pathological individualization' (p. 64) 8 .…”