Place and the uncanny in child protection social work: exploring findings from an

ethnographic study

Abstract

This paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of child protection social

workers in Britain, which explored social workers’ experiences of and practices in space

and place. It draws on data from interviews with practitioners and observations that

were carried out as social workers moved around the places (the town, estates, streets

and areas around service users’ homes) where they worked. It focuses on the

significance of a particular affective experience, the uncanny, which social workers

evoked in many of their accounts of these places. The paper introduces recent

conceptualisations of space, affect and the uncanny before going on to consider data

from the interviews. The following themes are explored: the relationships between the

intimate spaces of service users' homes and the neighbourhoods in which they were

located; social workers' accounts of feeling vulnerable in public and open spaces; social

workers' experiences of feeling unsettled by apparently mundane features of

neighbourhood spaces. The paper draws on critical engagements with the uncanny to

consider its significance for child protection social work practice in Britain and its

consequences in terms of social workers’ potential to work in emplaced and locally

sensitive ways.

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Place and the uncanny in child protection social work: exploring findings from an

ethnographic study

Most recent literature about place in social work has taken one of three different

approaches. Some writers have employed psychological concepts to understand place,

often through adaptations of ideas already familiar to social workers (see discussions of

‘place attachment’ such as Possick, 2006; Jack, 2010) or through the use of approaches

from behavioural geography to understand our responses to our environment (e.g.

Wilkinson and Bissell, 2006). The spiritual significance of place has also started to be

explored in social work literature, particularly in relation to ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’

forms of knowledge (e.g. Zapf, 2005; Galloway et al., 2008). A third approach to space

and place can be found in Ferguson’s work, which develops a phenomenological

discussion of social workers’ experiences of spaces and foregrounds the central

significance of mobility in child protection work (Ferguson 2004; 2009a; 2009b; 2010a).

There is, therefore, an increasing engagement in social work with sociological and

geographical conceptualisations of place but with some limitations. Studies concerned

with practice have tended to focus on a restricted number of sites such as service users’

homes, social work offices and, for Ferguson at least, social workers’ cars. While some

of the authors have considered how social workers see the wider areas in which service

users live (for example de Montigny, 1995; Ferguson, 2010b; 2011), they still tend to

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consider these places in terms of social workers’ experiences as they pass through them

in their short journeys from car to front door.

In contrast, community social work literature in Britain has shown a long-standing

interest in neighbourhoods and other forms of locally defined place (Teater and

Baldwin, 2012; for examples see Holman, 1979; National Institute for Social Work, 1982;

Smale, 1988). The shift in policy towards personalisation and co-production of support

in adults’ services in Britain has seen renewed interest in the role of local communities,

neighbourhoods and networks in social care (Rhodes and Broad, 2011; Broad, 2015). In

addition, some critiques of defensive and bureaucratised children’s social work have

proposed a reorientation towards local communities and places instead (Holland et al.,

2011; Cottam and James, 2013; Featherstone, White and Morris, 2014). Most of this

literature suggests that there is currently a dearth of place-sensitive, locally engaged

children’s social work in Britain. While the risk averse, information systems driven

nature of child protection social work in Britain distinguishes it from practice in many

other countries, research conducted elsewhere has concluded that social workers’

practice might still be grounded on restricted conceptions of and engagements with

local places (see for example Narhi’s 2002 discussion of social workers’ views about

neighbourhoods in Finland).

This paper seeks to consider the uncanny as a feature of social workers’ talk about and

affective experience of the places where they work, which is likely to be significant in

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understanding the barriers to more place sensitive, locally engaged practice in children’s

social work in Britain. It draws on findings from an ethnographic study of children’s

safeguarding social workers’ experiences of space and place more broadly, which has

led to insights about other features of social workers’ experiences of and practices in

space (see Jeyasingham, 2014; 2016).

The research, carried out as part of my study for a doctorate, took place in 2011-2012.

Ethical approval was granted from a university ethical approval committee and a

regional committee which considered ethical and research governance matters for the

two local authorities in which the research took place. The study comprised

observations of social workers in a social work team in each local authority, over the

course of three months at each site, with the aim of understanding further how social

workers negotiated space in their everyday practice and how they talked about spaces

and places during their work and in research interviews. Observations took place in

social workers’ offices, supervision sessions, professionals meetings related to child

protection and domestic violence and in social workers’ cars and service users’ homes

when social workers visited them. As well as the observations, I carried out semi-

structured interviews with those participants who were available and willing to take part

(24 participants out of a total of 46 who were observed), which took place in separate

rooms in social workers’ offices and focused on their practices in space and their

expressed thoughts about the places (offices, homes, neighbourhoods, local authorities

etc) in which they worked. I also carried out six mobile interviews with social workers –

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three in each of the two sites. In these interviews I asked participants to show me

around the places where they worked by driving or walking with me whilst talking about

their work and the place more generally. In doing this, I aimed to explore how social

workers’ movement through and immersion in places might be significant for how those

places come to be experienced and represented (see Anderson, 2004; Buscher et al.,

2011 and Shaw and Holland, 2014 for discussions of walking as a mobile method of

research).

I made detailed fieldnotes during and after observations, while interviews were audio-

recorded and transcribed except in two circumstances where participants were not

comfortable with this. The fieldnotes, transcripts and notes from interviews that were

not transcribed were then analysed methodically through manual coding, from which

emerged key themes relating to the production of space in practice. Data was

anonymised at the point where notes were made and interviews transcribed, with

pseudonyms being used for all participants and places (neighbourhood and street

names were replaced with the names of ferns). Data was stored securely in accordance

with ethical approval.

This paper presents findings from mobile interviews, interviews at offices and fieldnotes

from my observations of and conversations with social workers while moving around

the place in which they worked. It examines the uncanny resonances of social workers’

talk about the places where they worked. The uncanny was not an initial focus of the

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study but it emerged as one of a small number of affective frames through which social

workers presented spaces and spoke about making sense of them (others included

delight - particularly in relation to certain small children - and disgust, and these will be

explored in a forthcoming paper). These affective frames were not necessarily apparent

in the practice contexts that I observed (such as supervision sessions and meetings with

service users or other professionals) but they are considered here because they are

likely to be significant for the judgements that social workers make in their practice.

Uncanny resonances were apparent in interviews and observations across both sites but

in the paper I focus on data from one of the two research sites, a town referred to in

this paper as Lumberton. This allows me to consider further the similarities and

differences between the ways that the same places were experienced and represented

by different participants.

Affect is a key focus of a body of recent work in cultural geography that has come to be

termed non-representational theory or NRT (Thrift, 2008). In NRT, affect is distinguished

from both emotions and sensations in that it ‘does not reside in an object or body, but

surfaces from somewhere in between' (Adey, 2008a: p. 439). Lorimer’s (2008) review of

developments in NRT notes the differing ways that it has been theorised but identifies a

unifying aspect of this body of literature as the wish to locate affect in the environment

rather than solely within sensate bodies. Affect is therefore a way of understanding

bodies, things, motivations and movements as aspects of wider spaces and places,

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rather than features of individuated agents. Prioritising the human subject as the

default site and scale for understanding feelings, sensations or gestures is questioned.

Instead, places and their resonances, the ways in which material spaces intrude into and

affect experience, are prioritised as focuses for investigation. While NRT questions the

importance that has been attached to the symbolic in discussions of space and place, it

does not seek simply to attend to concrete features of space. The material and non-

material are not seen as opposing registers of experience; instead, NRT literature argues

that a fuller engagement with the material requires a deeper understanding of its

immaterial dimensions. Latham and McCormack (2004) explore how materiality

emerges processually through interactions between the material and non-material: the

‘complex realities of apparently stable objects [...] are always held together and

animated by processes excessive of form and position’ (2004: p. 705). So, in order to

understand materiality, we need to consider the associations and processes through

which materials come into being. This focus enables NRT to examine those aspects of

spaces and places that cannot be apprehended through solely technical means but

which notions of genius loci or place attachment tend to frame in ways that assume

bounded human subjects. Affect, in the pared down terms through which it is

understood in NRT, is a way of engaging with this interaction between material and

immaterial.

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Place and the uncanny

The discussion above suggests a consideration of place and the uncanny that focuses

not just on how places are represented or constructed through talk and text but also the

role of affective experience in the production of places through bodies moving through

them. In this approach, the uncanny is located between subjective experiences and

places themselves, produced out of interactions between material features, talk and the

immaterial.

The uncanny has been understood in critical literature in a number of ways: the

experience of something as both familiar and strange; a response to things that are

inanimate but seem as if they are alive; the simultaneous sense of feeling out of place in

the present and haunted by past occurrences. It might be the eerie feeling that comes

with the intruding sense that we are not the subject who looks but instead the object of

an unknown other's gaze (Cixous, 1976). It might be the sense that something is almost

exactly as it should be, but not quite - as Mori (2012) suggests, dead bodies, life-like

robots or the masked figures in Noh theatre seem uncanny to the extent that these

things look right but do not move when we expect them to, or do not move as they

should. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud (1919) presented it as the jarring sensation

that comes when something familiar is encountered in an unexpected context, or vice

versa. Freud was interested in the idea of a doppleganger, a common figure in Gothic

literature who appears to be the exact likeness of a central character but who brings a

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sense of menace or evil to the story. The uncanny might therefore be impossible to

identify but, nevertheless, makes itself felt through a creeping sense of disquiet.

Collins and Jervis (2008) argue that the uncanny should be seen as a distinctively

modern sensibility, arising as the inevitable reverse of the priority given to rational

explanation in modernity. It is felt in relation to features of social experience that

previously could have been explained through reference to religion or the supernatural

but, while such systems of belief might once have provided ways of making sense of the

inexplicable, with the uncanny these uncertainties persist in the form of particular kinds

of affective experience - a feeling of unease or the sense of something both indistinct

and troubling. Academic writing about the uncanny has proliferated since the 1980s

and Ffytche (2012) argues that we can now talk of ‘uncanny theory’, suggesting that the

notion has had a profound impact on disciplines across the humanities and social

sciences, with new approaches to interpretation that aim to accentuate uncanny

aspects of their research object rather than seeking to impose a determinate analysis.

In this way the uncanny becomes not just a focus of research (such as work on ghosts,

vampires and zombies) but a tool for scholarly enquiry itself. Chattopadhyay (2010), for

example, suggests that the uncanny offers ‘a useful device for approaching the

methodological need to reconcile what we can and cannot experience’ (p.649).

Engaging with the uncanny, indeed, recreating it in academic enquiry is claimed as a

method of phenomenological exploration that sustains a sense of the indeterminate,

opening up broader ways of engaging with the world.

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Writing about the uncanny has tended to draw on a variety of sources including Freud’s

(1919) essay, the psychoanalytic discussions that it later inspired and Derrida’s (1994)

engagement with Heidegger and haunting. The idea of place is central to each of these,

with the focus of Freud’s paper being das unheimliche (which can be translated as either

uncanny or unhomely), while Derrida’s work is concerned with Heidegger’s

understanding of dwelling or being in the world. Not surprisingly then, there has been a

considerable amount of interest in the uncanny in those disciplines concerned with

space and place such as cultural geography, architecture and urban studies (e.g. Battista

et al., 2005; Hook, 2005; Donald, 1999).

Findings: social workers’ accounts of places

The following discussion seeks to explore the uncanny as it arose in social workers’ talk

about the places where they worked. It is important to provide some orienting

information about the place where these social workers were based. Lumberton is an

expanded town where new development has been promoted through government

policy and, as such, it shares many features of the new towns that were developed in

Britain in the 20th century. There is a mix of social and private housing and a relatively

high level of social diversity, with some affluent neighbourhoods and several areas of

significant social deprivation. There are also higher than average levels of fear of crime

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in many areas (Communities and Local Government, 2011) but the town does not have

exceptional social problems.

The use of mobile interviews as a method enabled participants to construct accounts of

places that were both verbal and visual and that developed across time and space. For

example, participants often spoke about places while we were approaching them in

ways that created a degree of tension over time between them knowing and me seeing

places, and this often had the effect of suggesting intimate and privileged knowledge.

They stopped their cars outside certain places, presenting particular profiles and

perspectives of those places while talking about them. Sometimes they suggested that

we leave the car and walk through certain areas, and the affective experiences of such

movements are ones that I aim both to evoke and consider, to the extent that they are

involved in producing place in certain ways (Lefebvre, 1991; Jeyasingham, 2014). In

what follows I focus on three elements of social workers' talk about spaces and places,

each of which contributed to a sense of the uncanny. These are:

The relationships between the intimate spaces in which social workers encountered

service users and the neighbourhoods where they were located;

Social workers' accounts of becoming aware that they were being watched and,

more generally, feeling vulnerable in public and open spaces;

Social workers' experiences of feeling unsettled by apparently mundane features of

neighbourhood spaces.

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Drawing relationships between intimate spaces and neighbourhoods

During the mobile interviews, each of the social workers described small, specific areas

in vivid and definitive terms. For instance, Jonathanʼs descriptions of the Autumn estate

were deeply resonant. His tour was organised in such a way that it constructed the

estate as a significant destination, a 'very important but difficult [place] to find', later

described as a 'very deprived area' then, when we finally turned on to the estate's

service road: 'This is the famous Autumn estate'. While showing me around the estate,

he drove the car into a cul de sac, pulled up and stated: ‘This is Clinton’s Wood. It’s

quite a frightening place to come to’. He went on to tell me about two cases that he

had in Clinton’s Wood. One featured violence and, while he did not suggest a causal

relationship, it seemed from Jonathan's description that aspects of the violence

resonated for him in the environment. In the other case, a woman had moved back and

forth between relationships with two different men in neighbouring flats until, in the

end, the three of them moved in together. He presented this as an ironic story but also

one that communicated something about a dearth of moral expectations on the estate;

something which, his account suggested, also resonated in the built environment itself.

He commented on the lack of privacy in Clinton’s Wood, his perception that the flats

were not clearly residential in appearance, the difficulty in distinguishing fronts and

backs of the homes, the fact that some of the flats had garages while none of the

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residents owned cars – something which he said was ‘odd’. While he said that he felt

frightened coming to Cinton’s Wood, Jonathan’s description of the place emphasised

instead a sense of things being disordered or out of place.

Social workers frequently talked about the domestic and intimate spaces in which they

worked. They often framed concerns about such spaces in terms of absences -

sometimes a material lack of food or toys but, in other accounts, a less tangible absence

of warmth, atmosphere and personality that, social workers suggested, became

apparent through a sense of feeling troubled when in these spaces. Other accounts of

places produced a similar sense of space as troubling through a contrast between

external appearances and what social workers presented as the reality of family life

inside the home. During her mobile interview, Ruth talked about the importance of

seeing inside houses in order to form a judgement about children's care:

It gives you a lot of ideas about how the family operates and who's in control.

Sometimes, it's not what they say, it's what's about and how it's organised. And

the clutter that's there. I worked with a family and if you saw this woman you'd

think that she came out from a really immaculate house but you went into the

house - and the house is infested by flies.

Such stories seemed to be ways in which social workers made claims to privileged

knowledge about places - unlike other professionals who saw children only outside their

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homes or who visited only occasionally or on prearranged visits, social workers saw

'behind the scenes'. Sometimes this contrast was used by social workers to make claims

to privileged knowledge about a family's strengths (where other professionals saw only

the problems) but more often, as in the account above, it was used to suggest that

something was hidden that was malign in nature.

Sometimes, as above, a contrast was suggested between intimate spaces and the wider

places in which service users lived but, more frequently, the intimate spaces of service

usersʼ lives functioned in social workers' accounts to stand for whole neighbourhoods.

Each social worker presented a landscape of Lumberton that was largely flat and

unspectacular but also featured points of intense resonance. These were places of

ambiguity or hidden problems, about which social workers possessed insight because of

their special knowledge of certain cases. During the mobile interviews or when we were

driving around whilst social workers were out on visits, they pointed out to me places

where past or present service users lived. They told me about critical events of child

abuse, domestic violence, suicide, stand-offs between service users and police or

dramatic removals of children, all of which were presented as grounded in the places

where they happened and appeared to continue to resonate there for social workers,

even after families had movedaway. These places were always small enough to be

sensed at the scale of the human body - a block of flats which can be approached and

apprehended visually, a boarded up house that can be driven past, a shopping parade

that can be walked through. They were presented as symbolising something about the

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wider places in which they were located and, in these ways, small or interior spaces

came to characterise neighbourhoods and wider scales of space in their accounts.

Becoming aware of being watched in open spaces

The following account illustrates a feature of wider constructs of place that also

appeared in other conversations - the sense that the places where participants worked

were not as they might initially have appeared. Marianne told me a story of how, at the

end of the day, she was walking to the council car park, located five minutes’ walk from

the office. She described this walk to me and her feeling of becoming aware of

something. She saw heads popping up in a pub window and then realised that one of

them was a woman who had been a client of hers, who was pointing her out to other

people in the pub. She described how this incident led her to feel differently about the

place, that the car park is secluded and this ‘leaves you vulnerable’, so she no longer

uses it. When I interviewed Marianne at a later point, I asked her about Lumberton and

she discussed the same part of the town:

D: Can I ask you about Lumberton? How would you describe it?

M: That’s a difficult one. Me and [another social worker] were talking about that

last night. Because when we went to – I don’t know if you’ve been up to where

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the top car park is, where the church is, near the market square? Cos I said to her,

Lumberton is a funny place. You’d think of it as a quiet little market town but then

you’ve got all this other stuff, all this stuff that we deal with. So on the surface if

you were looking for somewhere to live you’d come along and go ‘Oh, nice little

shopping centre, nice, it seems ok’. But I think – and I suppose it’d be the same

for anywhere we work – because we see the two faces of towns, don’t we? If you

didn’t do social work you’d just come here and shop and whatever and you

wouldn’t see any of the other stuff. But because we do the work that we do, we

see the deprivation and the drugs and all the rest of it. In the role that you do

you’re exposed to things that normal people aren’t going to see because that’s not

what they go there for.

Although Marianne did not repeat the story she previously told me, she referred to its

location and it seems likely that she was reminded of the event when she walked

through the place the night before and again during the interview itself when I asked

her to describe how she thought of the whole town. Her account contrasted surface

appearances with what was said to be really happening, she referred to the two faces of

a town, only one of which most people, including most people who lived there, would

see. Social workers come to see behind the facade or below the surface. The feelings

inspired in her first account – coming to realise that you are being watched, seeing the

place as it really is, not as it appears – recur when Marianne is in the market square but

also when she is asked about the town as a whole. The feelings aroused by these highly

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located experiences seep into the wider scale of the place. ‘Lumberton is a funny place’.

Other social workers also told me stories about feeling vulnerable and exposed or

experiencing hostility in the neighbourhoods where they worked. As with Marianne's

story, some other accounts were constructed around similar patterns of becoming

conscious of past or current clients or even, in one case, a past client's dog, in places

where they did not expect them to be. These stories elicited a range of uncanny

feelings - moments of recognition that combine with features that disrupt our sense of

the familiar, because they do not completely fit our expectations. Sometimes these

instances provoked feelings of vulnerability, at other times a sense of disquiet at

becoming aware of one’s conspicuousness, one’s outsider status in places that had felt

familiar or the presence of others in places that one had previously not associated with

them.

Being unsettled by superficially mundane features of spaces

During the fieldwork generally, social workers frequently referred to the physical

organisation and quality of the town's housing estates, saying that these distinguished

Lumberton as a place with severe social problems. During the mobile interviews, each

of the participants presented neighbourhood spaces as having unsettling or

troublesome qualities but, significantly, they each chose different areas of the town to

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illustrate this and they drew on stories from their personal practice in order to explain

these features. Sam took me to Western Cliff district centre so I could ‘see just how

concrete the jungle is’. We got out of the car and walked around, and she pointed out a

'mother and baby unit', people whom she said were clearly 'druggies' and a block of

flats which she called ‘H Block’ (a reference to heroin). However, these features and

visual perspectives that she presented did not provide evidence of social problems - in

fact, the housing and open spaces seemed well planned, built and maintained. Western

Cliff is an area of significant social deprivation and there is evidence that crime is a

particular problem on the estate (Communities and Local Government, 2011). Sam’s

comments were therefore not groundless but they were based on knowledge of social

problems in the area that were not visible to me during our journey, even though she

seemed to expect that they would be. I tried to explore where Sam’s knowledge of

these problems came from but this was difficult for her to identify.

While Ruth and I were parked in Staghorn, an estate that she often visited, I asked her

about the physical organisation of the neighbourhood. She said:

I don’t like it. It breeds, it breeds - everyone is on top of each other. Look at this.

There seems to be a lack of privacy everywhere, you know what I mean, there’s no

privacy. I’m working with a family and they live on a corner and people walk past

the house and .... People tend to gather on the corner and notice what everyone

else is doing. What I find in Lumberton is a lot of people don’t work. I mean, a lot

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of people do but ... So their time is spent on corners talking, knowing everyone’s

business, so if something happens everyone wants to know.

Many of the features of estates that Ruth and other social workers talked to me about –

diversity in housing styles, high levels of natural surveillance in shared public areas,

restricting car traffic to the edges of residential areas and promoting pedestrian and

cycle traffic – would have been designed to reduce opportunities for crime and increase

a sense of belonging in local spaces. However, each of these features was seen by

different social workers as troubling. Ruth highlighted the secluded alleyways leading to

homes in Silver Cloak because she thought that they increased the risk of crime but she

was also critical of the network of broad footpaths and cycle-paths that connect Silver

Cloak and other estates, which are well used and have high visibility. She noted the

problems of long pathways leading to front doors in Silver Cloak but, in Staghorn, the

closeness of homes to the pavement was seen as a problem. Jonathan described the

deserted feel of Clinton’s Wood as problematic, while Ruth suggested that there was

too much interaction in public spaces in Lumberton. More specifically, Ruth's account

presents such features as both personally troubling - 'I don't like it' - and unsettling in

implicitly sexual terms - 'it breeds, it breeds - everyone is on top of each other'.

Jonathan's story about Clinton's Wood also pointed to sexual relations that were both

amusing and resonated with those aspects of the built environment that he found

incongruous or 'odd'. For these social workers, local spaces seemed tainted by a small

number of dramatic, distressing or distasteful events that they knew about through

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their practice, which had once occurred in those places. This tainted quality was

troubling for them but also concealed within apparently unexceptional spaces. It was

difficult for them to explain and for me to identify, but it still felt real to these social

workers who tended to sense something about the spaces where clients' homes were

located that seemed to them either to cause or to reflect the problems experienced by

those people.

Discussion: Producing uncanny places

Certain writing in social work has begun to explore social workers’ accounts of

disquieting experiences of interior spaces (e.g. Ferguson, 2010b), with some work

employing approaches that recreate the uncanny qualities of social work practice. My

sense is that the social workers in my study were also doing this about wider scales of

space. The uncanny appeared in their interviews as an affective quality that could

convey important aspects of practice experience, while it was unlikely to be articulated

in formal practice spaces such as the office discussions, meetings and home visits that I

observed. So place matters for social work, in the sense that places are seen as

significant for service users’ experiences, but also because certain ways of experiencing,

thinking about and talking about practice are more available in some places than in

others. There are a number of conclusions that I have drawn from these findings,

alongside analysis of fieldnotes from the observation aspects of the study. Whilst this is

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a small study from which it is not possible to generalise, I am offering these conclusions

because they raise questions about social workers’ experience and accounts of places

that could be significant for attempts to promote more place sensitive and locally

engaged practice.

The first point that I want to make is that social workers offered detailed accounts of

places that drew on protected or ‘insider’ knowledge about places and events that

occurred in them to produce accounts of places that were often compelling. However,

they did not seem to draw on a great deal of formal knowledge about space and place in

their descriptions. They lacked the breadth of reference that other ways of talking

about similar places have provided - Hanley (2007), for instance, gives a rich and

evocative account of ‘The Wood’, a large social housing estate with some similarities to

many of the neighbourhoods in Lumberton. Her account certainly captures the uncanny

qualities of The Wood, where narrow walkways create malevolent walls of wind (pp. 1-

2) and flat-roofed houses look ‘like headless bodies’ (p. 24). The difference is that

Hanley grounds her description of the material qualities of the place with discussion of

the history of social housing in Britain and descriptions of a much broader array of lived

experiences in such places. Social workers’ accounts constructed place as uncanny

partly by emptying it of many potential associations which could serve to ground it –

recent urban planning policy, the industrial history of the area, aspects of more distant

history (which are prominently displayed in public places in Lumberton) and the day to

day lived experience of people living or working there. Instead they produced rich

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accounts of place identity by drawing on other, fairly narrow, registers of information –

the immediate visually perceived environment alongside intimate knowledge about

certain isolated events that had occurred in these places in the past.

The second point is that while social workers were generally reluctant to talk about the

identity of places at a larger scale, they constructed meaningful accounts of much

smaller places, those small enough to be engaged with visually or easily walked around.

At this scale, place was often seen as the cause of social problems. Social workers were

drawing here on common sense ideas about poor urban planning leading to or

compounding social exclusion, even though marginalisation is never simply the result of

such features, arising as it does from structures of power that operate at societal and

global scales. As well as being interested in small scales of space, social workers often

showed me aspects of places that were themselves small or imperceptible. I often

found them difficult to see or I failed to perceive them in the ways that the participants

did. They also sometimes presented places as connected to service users’ problems in

esoteric ways: visible, mundane features of places were seen to evoke a sense of

traumatic past events or present troubles. In these ways, I think that social workers

were performing a particular kind of attentiveness to the uncanny qualities of place,

displaying a sensibility that is alert to clues that might not be apparent or that could not

be fully understood by lay people and sensitive to resonances that others might not be

able to feel.

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A key question for me is why the uncanny stories that social workers offered during

interviews might be meaningful or appealing ways of presenting places. In relation to

sociology, Avery Gordon has outlined the need to develop a form of accounting for

things which is

distinct from the diagnostics of postmodern hypervisibility. The purpose of an

alternative diagnostics is to link the politics of accounting, in all its political-

economic, institutional, and affective dimensions, to a potent imagination of what

has been done and what is to be done otherwise. (1997: 18)

This appeal seems relevant for social work. Practitioners need ways of making meaning

from their work outside of the technical systems of categorisation and narrowly

psychological frameworks of knowledge that prevailed in the accounts of cases that I

heard in their talk during practice. In contrast, the uncanny stories that I sometimes

heard in interviews enabled a sense of uncertainty to be maintained rather than

disavowed, they presented service users’ lives as rich in meaning and they featured

social workers themselves as mobile, feeling body-subjects. Discussions of reflexivity

and respectful uncertainty suggest that these are all features of practice which are

important to maintain (e.g.Taylor and White, 2006) but a privileging of the uncanny also

carries certain risks - of fetishising aspects of the urban environment, exaggerating

certain aspects of social exclusion and presenting a romanticised, highly edited version

of the past. In particular, it risks operating as a sensibility that finds reason for concern

23

in any focus, including the absence of materially apparent concerns. Derek Hook

identifies

two basic ‘poles’ of the uncanny: anxieties concerning variants of embodied

absence on the one hand and disembodied presence on the other. These are

anxieties about the soul, which becomes problematic by virtue of either its

absence (where it should be present) or its presence (where it should be absent).

(2005: p. 697, original emphasis)

Hook connects this with two central themes in horror: zombies, vampires and the like

are embodied and animate but dead and soulless; ghosts and other forms of free-

floating consciousness are disembodied but present. Horror is a useful comparison to

social work because, as a fictional form, it is powerfully resonant with some of the same

affective qualities – fear, disgust, unease – that feature in British social work and, while

no zombies or other forms of embodied absence came to light in this study, there was

plenty of evidence of disembodied presence. Participants sensed that they were being

watched in open spaces, history was said to repeat itself over generations, social

workers imputed horrible past events into clients’ present lives and felt these resonating

in places long after clients had moved or cases were closed. These ontologies, while

supported by certain flawed frameworks of practice knowledge (the return of the

repressed, intergenerational cycles of abuse, socialisation based understandings of

24

social deprivation) are more magical than explicated; their powerful resonance stems

from the fact that full explanations are concealed or continually deferred.

The potential appeal of the uncanny and the risks that it holds as a sensibility for social

work enquiry suggest we should be cautious about embracing it uncritically. While the

accounts of places and the feelings evoked by participants in this study are richly

textured and deeply resonant, they should not be taken as simple reflections of the

affective experience of practice. These are fictive accounts that become meaningful in

part through the extent to which they chime with dominant representations of urban

spaces as dangerous, uncanny backdrops for heroic action against malign forces. Even

though they suggest a spatial sensibility that is not often evident in formal accounts of

practice, their sensuous qualities are limited to the visual and they come to life through

a peculiarly cinematic aesthetic. They might indicate the inadequacy of more formal

knowledge systems for engaging with place but they probably constitute inadequately

critical and imaginative approaches to place themselves. As such they reveal some

potential limitations of social work ways of understanding and engaging with place in

contemporary Britain.

25

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the social workers who took part in this study and to Sue White, Andrew Pack

and colleagues and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier

versions of this paper.

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