The Role of Social Work Practice and Policy in the Lived and Intimate Citizenship of Young People with Psychological Disorders

Abstract

Drawing on the concepts of lived and intimate citizenship and applying a weak theory approach, Warming shows how social work practices at a residence for young people with psychological disorders constitute a social intervention with contested and multidimensional (action-related, emotional, affective, positioning-related) outcomes for clients’ rights, participation and belonging. Although the clients describe their stay as empowering and characterised by recognition, they also experience discrimination and exclusion. Indeed, the chapter’s socio-spatial analysis show how their time there unfolds as a risky dance on the edges of non-citizenship, where they are positioned as—or feel—out of place due to politically contingent everyday practices through which emotions, affections and more-than-human agents intertwine with rational human agency.