Stanford University Doctoral Candidate Bruce O'Neill, with the guidance of Dr. James G. Ferguson, will conduct ethnographic research on post-socialist homelessness. In many post-socialist countries, homelessness is a new phenomenon because the previous socialist states provided housing of some sort (apartments, but also orphanages and sanitoria) for all. The researcher wishes to investigate the relationship between homelessness and governance practices, urban spatial systems, and self-presentation of homeless people.
The research will be conducted in homeless shelters in Bucharest, Romania, which has a growing homeless shelter population - men, women and children left out of Romania's transition to the global economy. Preliminary research revealed that shelter residents are conspicuously and self-consciously bored. The existing social science literature understands boredom as 'time idly spent,' but the researcher will investigate the possibility that boredom may be productive, a form of governance or resistance to such governance. O'Neill will investigate this phonomenon through a multi-sited ethnography comprised of three social fields using participant-observation and in-depth interviewing of key informants. The first social field is a set of shelters administered by the state and by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The second social field focuses on public spaces, including the neighborhoods immediately surrounding homeless shelters as well as those in central Bucharest that the homeless visit to escape their boredom. The third social field includes mid-level government offices where shelter policy is administered.
Findings from this research will make theoretical contributions by (1) contextualizing post-socialist homelessness; (2) investigating the heretofore neglected topic of bordeom, re-conceptualized as productive affect; (3) revealing the relationships between affect and particular spaces and places; and (4) determining how affect comes to be appropriated by various projects of governance. This research will provide a new window into the classical social science concerns about poverty, productivity, and governance in post-socialist contexts. Supporting this research also supports the education of a graduate student.
Bruce’s ethnographic study of boredom and self-governance investigated how people who became homeless in post-Communist Bucharest, Romania, managed their poverty in a moment of prolonged economic instability. Contributing directly to the anthropological study of poverty, labor and the city, this research (at its most basic) adds empirical depth and analytical insight to the phenomenon of downward mobility – an ethnographic fact rampant in Bucharest, but also the world over following the 2008 Global Economic Crisis. This study found that homeless persons in Bucharest experienced the daily suffering of poverty as a grindingly dull space of boredom marked by the absence of work, family and the capacity to consume. While boredom is typically thought of as a temporal phenomenon associated with privilege, Bruce’s ethnographic work demonstrates that boredom also has spatial dimensions related to poverty. Boredom, Bruce found, is a marginal space that lacks purposeful things to do, prompting the poor to move towards certain places and away from others in search of opportunity. By studying poverty from an existential perspective, this research brings into clearer relief how economic crisis shapes understandings of selfhood, and in turn, the social and spatial practices through which people manage life at the margins. This research aspired towards a set of four contributions, the most empirical one being an ethnographic account of the lives of homeless men and women in post-Communist Bucharest, Romania. For the sake of social workers and government administrators charged with the task of managing Romania’s growing homeless population, and for the sake of bettering the lives of his informants who are in need of concrete aid, Bruce’s study provided much needed ethnographic data into the lived realities of homelessness in Romania. The second contribution is an ethnographic theorization of the space of boredom lurking at the margins of the city. Although a widely shared phenomenon over the last two centuries, there is little mention of boredom in social scientific literature. Bruce has found this space of boredom to be existential, but also infrastructural and related to the planning and management of spaces for the homeless. This study provides insight into how homeless shelters, for example, might be redesigned to better serve homeless populations. Bruce’s third contribution is to a growing interest in the social scientific literature on unemployment and ‘inactivity’ in Eastern Europe and beyond. This study examines widespread un- and under-employment to understand the existential conditions, social relations and urban spaces that come about by living lives deemed unnecessary and inessential by a brutally efficient labor market. Finally, this study provides insight into a growing anthropological concern over how economic failure remakes ones sense of self. This study captures the grinding effects of downward mobility that give birth to a particular mode of being – one marked by a tormenting existential state of boredom that wares away from within, just as material deprivation wares upon the body. It is an ethnographic observation taken from homeless shelters and squatter camps in Bucharest, Romania, that echoes through the headlines of international news outlets and the unemployment figures of many crippled economies worldwide.
