Recordkeeping, logistics, and translation: a study of homeless services systems as infrastructure

Pelle Tracey1, Patricia Martínez García1, Ricardo L. Punzalan1
1University of Michigan School of Information, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Tóm tắt

AbstractHomeless services systems provide unhoused individuals access to emergency shelter, subsidized housing, and other life-sustaining resources. In this paper, we present a qualitative study that draws on the experiences of fifteen social service workers to examine how recordkeeping practices sustain homeless services systems and unite a tangled web of institutions and actors, including public housing systems, nonprofit agencies, and local governments. We address the following research questions: How is the infrastructure of homeless services sustained by recordkeeping? How are social service workers affected by increasing recordkeeping demands? In what ways do social service workers work against or ‘find the play’ in this system? To address these questions, we collected interviews and conducted artifact walkthroughs with our study participants. We analyzed the data using an infrastructural lens and found that current recordkeeping practices within homeless services systems comprise an "infrastructure of last resort" that functions logistically, prioritizing efficiency and speed. We also found that social service workers “speak back” to logistification by making the homeless services infrastructure more legible to their unhoused clients through mediation and acts of translation that help to produce better resource outcomes. Our findings show how structuring recordkeeping in ways that privilege efficiency and speed disrupts social service work and interferes with social service workers’ ability to provide care for vulnerable individuals facing life-altering and life-threatening hardships.

Từ khóa


Tài liệu tham khảo

Acker A (2015) How cells became records: standardization and infrastructure in tissue culture. Arch Sci 15(1):1–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-013-9213-x

Balagot C, Lemus H, Hartrick M, Kohler T, Lindsay SP (2019) The homeless coordinated entry system: the VI-SPDAT and other predictors of establishing eligibility for services for single homeless adults. J Soc Distress Homeless 28(2):149–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/10530789.2019.1622858

Beck E, Twiss P (2019) The homelessness industry: a critique of US social policy. Lynne Reinner Press, Denver CO

Bernard HR (2011) Research methods in anthropology: qualitative and quantitative approaches, 5th edn. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Md

Braun V, Clarke V (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qual Res Psychol 3(2):77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa

Bruner ME (2019) Documenting ICE: appraising records of US immigration detention. J Crit Libr and Inf Stud 2:2. https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v2i2.73

Caswell M, Cifor M (2016) From human rights to feminist ethics: radical empathy in the archives. Archivaria 81:23–43

Clarke AE (2005) Situational analysis: grounded theory after the postmodern turn. Sage Publications

Drake JM (2014) Insurgent citizens: the manufacture of police records in post-Katrina New Orleans and its implications for human rights. Arch Sci 14(3–4):365–380. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9224-2

Eagle JH (2019) ‘I want them to know we suffer here’: preserving records of migrant detention in opposition to racialized immigration enforcement structures. J Radic Librariansh 5:16–40

Edwards PN (2002) Infrastructure and modernity: force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems. In: Brey P, Rip A, Feenberg A (eds) Technology and modernity: the empirical turn. MIT Press

Edwards PN (2010) A vast machine: computer models, climate data, and the politics of global warming. MIT Press

Garcia P (2014) Documenting and classifying labor: the effect of legal discourse on the treatment of H-2A workers. Arch Sci 14(3–4):345–363. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9230-4

Gilliland AJ (2017) A matter of life or death: a critical examination of the role of records and archives in supporting the agency of the forcibly displaced. J Crit Libr Inf Stud 1:2. https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.36

Golding F, Lewis A, McKemmish S, Rolan G, Thorpe K (2021a) Rights in records: a charter of lifelong rights in childhood recordkeeping in out-of-home care for Australian and indigenous Australian children and care leavers. Int J Hum Rights 25(9):1625–1657. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2020.1859484

Golding F, McKemmish S, Reed B (2021b) Towards transformative practice in out of home care: chartering rights in recordkeeping. Arch Manuscr 49(3):186–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2021.1954041

Graham S, Marvin S (2001) Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Routledge, London

Harris V (2002) The archival sliver: power, memory, and archives in South Africa. Arch Sci 2(1–2):63–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435631

Hedstrom M (1991) Understanding electronic incunabula: a framework for research on electronic records. Am Arch 54(3):334–354. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.54.3.125253r60389r011

Hoyle V, Shepherd E, Flinn A, Lomas E (2018) Child social-care recording and the information rights of care-experienced people: a recordkeeping perspective. Br J Soc Work, December. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcy115

Hoyle V, Shepherd E, Lomas E, Flinn A (2020) Recordkeeping and the life-long memory and identity needs of care-experienced children and young people. Child & Fam Soc Work 25(4):935–945. https://doi.org/10.1111/cfs.12778

Hull MS (2012) Documents and bureaucracy. Annu Rev Anthropol 41(1):251–267. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104953

Karasti H, Baker KS, Millerand F (2010) Infrastructure time: long-term matters in collaborative development. Comput Support Coop Work (CSCW) 19(3–4):377–415. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-010-9113-z

Larkin B (2013) The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annu Rev of Anthropol 42(1):327–343. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522

LeCavalier J (2016) The rule of logistics: Walmart and the architecture of fulfillment. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

McKemmish S, Iacovino L, Ketelaar E, Castan M, Russell L (2011) Resetting relationships: archives and Indigenous human rights in Australia. Arch Manuscr 39(1):107–144

Parks L, Starosielski N (eds) (2015) Signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures. University of Illinois Press

Peters JD (2015) The marvelous clouds: toward a philosophy of elemental media. University of Chicago Press

Punzalan RL, Caswell M (2016) Critical directions for archival approaches to social justice. Libr Q 86(1):25–42. https://doi.org/10.1086/684145

Raven M, Flanders A (1996) Using contextual inquiry to learn about your audiences. ACM SIGDOC Asterisk J Comput Doc 20(1):1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/227614.227615

Rossiter N (2017) Locative media as logistical media: situating infrastructure and the governance of labor in supply-chain capitalism”. In: Wilken R, Goggin G (eds) Locative media. Routledge

Rossiter N (2021) Logistical media theory, the politics of time, and the geopolitics of automation. In: Hockenberry M, Starosielski N, Zieger S (eds) Assembly Codes. Duke University Press

Schwartz JM, Cook T (2002) Archives, records, and power: the making of modern memory. Arch Sci 2(1–2):1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435628

Sexton A, Sen D (2018) More voice, less ventriloquism—exploring the relational dynamics in a participatory archive of mental health recovery. Int J Herit Stud 24(8):874–888

Shepherd E, Hoyle V, Lomas E, Flinn A, Sexton A (2020) Towards a human-centred participatory approach to child social care recordkeeping. Arch Sci 20(4):307–325. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-020-09338-9

Star SL (1999) Ethnography of infrastructure. Am. Behav Sci 43(3):377–391

Star SL, Ruhleder K (1996) Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces. Inf Syst Res 7(1):111–134. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.7.1.111

Starosielski N (2015) The undersea network. sign, storage, transmission. Duke University Press

Trace CB (2002) What is recorded is never simply ‘what happened’: record keeping in modern organizational culture. Arch Sci 2(1–2):137–159. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435634

Trace CB (2022) Archival infrastructure and the information backlog. Arch Sci 22(1):75–93. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-021-09368-x

Tropea R, Ward G (2021) Fierce compassion and reflexivity: transforming practice at the University of Melbourne Archives. J Crit Libr Inf Stud 3:2. https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i2.121

Vismann C (2008) Files: law and media technology. Stanford University Press

Yakel E (2001) The social construction of accountability: radiologists and their record-keeping practices. The Info Soc 17(4):233–245. https://doi.org/10.1080/019722401753330832

Bopp C, Benjamin LM, Voida A (2019) The coerciveness of the primary key: infrastructure problems in human services work. Proc. of the ACM on Hum-Comput Interact 3 (CSCW): pp 1–26 doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3359153

Bowker GC. (2016) How knowledge infrastructures learn. In: Infrastructures and Social Complexity, 1st ed. Routledge

Evans, J, Golding F, O’Neill C, and Tropea R (2020) ‘All I want to know is who I am.’ In: Wallace D, Duff W, Saucier R, Flinn A (eds) Archives, recordkeeping and social justice, pp 105–26. doi: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315567846-6

Fowle, M, Gray F (2021) 2020 homeless deaths. Homeless Deaths Count. https://homelessdeathscount.org/data/2020-homeless-deaths/ Accessed 2 January 2023

Gilliland AJ, McKemmish S (2015) Rights in records as a platform for participative archiving. In: Archival Education and Research: Selected Papers from the 2014 AERI Conference, UCLA. Report #: 14. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5g3135n6. Accessed 2 January 2023

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University (2020) The State of the Nation’s Housing. Report. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/state-nations-housing-2020. Accessed 2 January 2023

Korn M, Schorch M, Pipek, Matthew Bietz M, Østerlund C, Procter R, Ribes D, Williams R (2017) E-infrastructures for research collaboration: the case of the social sciences and humanities. In: Companion of the 2017 ACM Conf. on Comput. Support. Coop. Work and Soc. Comput., pp 415–20. ACM, Portland Oregon USA. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3022198.3022655

Lyon-Callo V (2004) Inequality, poverty, and neoliberal governance: activist ethnography in the homeless sheltering Industry. Broadview Ethnographies & Case Studies. Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ont.; Orchard Park, N.Y

McKemmish S, Upward F, Reed B (2010) Records Continuum Model. In: Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, edited by Marcia J. Bates and Mary Niles Maack, pp 4447 - 4459. Taylor & Francis

Thomer AK, Twidale MB, Yoder MJ (2018) Transforming taxonomic interfaces: ‘arm’s length’ cooperative work and the maintenance of a long-lived classification system. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2 (CSCW): pp 1–23. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3274442

United States (2009) Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act of 2009, Pub L No 111–22, 123 Stat. 1663. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-123/pdf/STATUTE-123-Pg1632.pdf. Accessed 09 January 2023

United States (1987) Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, Pub L No 100–77, 101 Stat. 482. https://www.congress.gov/100/statute/STATUTE-101/STATUTE-101-Pg482.pdf. Accessed 05 January 2023

United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (2015) Opening doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness. https://www.usich.gov/resources/uploads/asset_library/USICH_OpeningDoors_Amendment2015_FINAL.pdf. Accessed 2 January 2023

United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (2020) The 2020 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress. https://www.hudexchange.info/homelessness-assistance/ahar/#2020-reports. Accessed 2 January 2023

Unluer S (2012) Being an insider researcher while conducting case study research. Qualitative Report 17. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ981455 Accessed 2 January 2023

Vora K (2015) Life support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor. Difference incorporated. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

Willse C (2015) The value of homelessness: managing surplus life in the United States. Difference incorporated. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis