'At home' in state institutions: The caring practices and potentialities of human service workers

The concept of care is receiving heightened attention in geographical debate. In studies of state institutions and social governance, a crisis of care is argued to have arisen with the advance of neoliberalism, driving the decline of welfare states and ensuing reductions in the mechanisms and practices of state-funded social support. A key part of this debate has been an attempt to 'revive' care within these social governing spaces, with care positioned as a potentially liberating resistance to neoliberalism. Whilst such studies draw valuable attention to trends in social governance, care appears only in relation to neoliberalism, detached from its everyday performances as part of innately peopled and practised state institutions. In this paper, I assemble a prosaic and less prescriptive framing of care and state institutions. I draw on accounts of workers engaged in an Australian human service programme who describe and enact a diversity of caring practices and relations in their everyday performances of human service provision as part of state institutions. I argue that care not only be considered in opposition to neoliberalism but also as part of a vital and prosaic ethic of working that is 'at home' in state institutions. Such an attention to care in human service work presents an opportunity to nurture the everyday performances and potentialities of care as part of these state spaces.