A politics of compassion: Informing a new social policy for homelessness?

Abstract

This article explores the role of emotions with a specific focus on discourses of compassion, in framing policy and service delivery responses to homelessness. While there has been some recent scholarly work on the emotions and homelessness, there has been little attempt to explore this in the context of social policy responses to homelessness and the resultant programmes within which services are delivered. Informing the analysis in this article is the view that the continued presence of social injustices including homelessness reflects an absence of concern for others and the forms of suffering inflicted personally and institutionally upon each other. These considerations suggest the possibility for satisfactorily addressing social inequities that have significantly been exacerbated by the promotion of policy frameworks informed by neoliberal rationalities, depending to a considerable degree on making alterations to both individual and collective value frameworks. Such transformative possibilities could be facilitated by the development of the virtue of compassion. Exploring the potential for a politics of compassion to inform policy responses to homelessness in particular has the capacity, among other things, to disrupt contemporary, taken-for-granted assumptions regarding welfare dependency and the role of government in welfare provision at a more general level.