Place and the uncanny in child protection social work: Exploring findings from an ethnographic study

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 (2003 [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 dopplegänger, a common figure in Gothic literature who appears to be the exact likeness of a central character but who brings a 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’ (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.

Writing about the uncanny has tended to draw on a variety of sources including Freud’s (2003 [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; Donald, 1999; Hook, 2005).

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, Jonathan’s 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 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 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.

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 users’ 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 moved away. 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 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 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.

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 illustrate this and they drew on stories from their personal practice 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 of people do but … So their time is spent on corners talking, knowing everyone’s business, so if something happens everyone wants to know.