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Trauma, Workfare and the Social Contingency of Precarity and Its Sufferings: The Story of Marius, A Street-Youth

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Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in London, Ontario, Canada, with homeless and street-involved youth in a youth drop-in shelter that I call “At Home”, this paper is an ethnographically grounded narrative analysis of interview content and participant observation with a centre focus on my key informant, a youth from Eastern Europe whom I call “Marius”. Like many other street youth, Marius lives a life marked by precarity. His daily life is marked by traumatic memories of abandonment and abuse, which has lead to an inability to work; and structural violence facilitated by Ontario’s workfare program called Ontario Works, especially its mandate that all “participants” (i.e. those in receipt of social assistance, such as Marius) seek employment or face termination of their social assistance check. For Marius, the recounting of traumatic memories at At Home opened up a shared rhetorical space from which he could narratively align himself vis-à-vis other street youth as a victim of precarity and trauma and therefore absolve himself of the onus to find employment. Regardless of his narrative positioning, he is constantly terminated from Ontario Works for not submitting proof of citizenship and proof of job-seeking activities. In conclusion, the only way for Marius to find any form of solace from his past and the constraints of OW is through isolation: a cultural stance that serves as a coping mechanism, and allows Marius to muddle through each day, all the while holding precarity and its pursuant anxiety and depression at bay.

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Notes

  1. The methodological focus of these studies is almost always purely quantitative; however, there are some that make use of non-ethnographic interview data.

  2. London, Ontario is a mid-sized Canadian city of 400,000 people. It is located 200 km west of Toronto.

  3. Even though Marius insisted I tell his story using his real name, in order to be consistent with the ethics protocol through which this research was conducted, I have chosen to change his name, as well as the name of the drop-in shelter that he used to frequent, for the sake of anonymity.

  4. Accompanying such measures was a drastic rate cut of 21.6 % to those on receipt of social assistance (Maki 2011).

  5. Andersen Consulting (now Accenture PLC), once based in Chicago, now has its headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.

  6. When youth reach the age of 24, they are no longer welcome at At Home and are encouraged to you adult-oriented services for the homeless.

  7. It provided my informants with a form of street credibility insofar as those with the most extreme histories of trauma were seen as “tougher” and, therefore, equipped with more “street-smarts”.

  8. However, in many contexts (especially those related to trauma), memory can overflow any ability to narrate and represent, hence the fact that many aspects of experience cannot be realized through language or symbolization (Spence 1982; Biehl 2010).

  9. Self and other, then, as I see it, are not ontologically given, but temporalized as unstable rhetorical processes of action and performance (Desjarlais 2000); they are always already contingent upon material context (Battaglia 1995).

  10. Both Han (2004) and Crapanzano (2004) critique the dominant North American assumption that trauma can be found in a single, discrete etiological event or destabilizing referent. Rather, this argument builds on Young’s (1993, 1995, 1996, 2000) insight that traumas—i.e. those that are narratively re-shaped by a formal PTSD diagnosis and underwritten by North American notions of the self as unitary and accessible via introspection and insight—are a revised series of memories wherein the self glues together a loose-knit biography of trauma based on heterogeneous, stigmatizing and self-defacing memories based on the economy of self-representation.

  11. The OW Director of Youth Services informed me during an interview that their office is audited extensively each month to make sure each caseworker is following the rules of the Ontario Works Act (1995) strictly.

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  1. Scott Polar Research Institute, The University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Mark S. Dolson

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Dolson, M.S. Trauma, Workfare and the Social Contingency of Precarity and Its Sufferings: The Story of Marius, A Street-Youth. Cult Med Psychiatry 39, 134–161 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-014-9409-4

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