In the Spring of 2011, I conducted 12 interviews with public housing tenants in Victoria, British Columbia. This research became the focus of my MA thesis research in anthropology. Both BC Housing's directly managed buildings and non-profit housing were included. My thesis aims to understand the motivations of tenants who desire to leave public housing and to situate these motivations within the framework of "push" and "pull" factors. In other words, to understand whether the desire to leave public housing stemmed from within in the housing system (push) or outside of it (pull). All participants reported push factors, though a few had been pushed from unsatisfactory public housing into satisfactory public housing. However, most participants felt stuck as they did not have the resources to pay for unaffordable market housing. The dissatisfaction they faced in public housing stemmed from problems with management/staff, problems with neighbours, and problems with the physical condition of housing. Many participants expressed fear that they would lose their housing if they expressed their rights as tenants or made complaints about the issues they faced. Complaints that were brought forward were seen as being ignored. In order to understand the frustration and fear participants experienced, I explore the idea of social assistance as "charity", which has its beginnings in the English Poor Laws, and what effect this has on the recipients. Social assistance as charity, including public housing, is given as a sort of "gift". I argue that in this framework, a gift should be accepted willingly and not questioned. This acts to silence complaints and plays off of common notions about who are the deserving poor and undeserving poor. / Graduate / 0326 / medavies@uvic.ca

no / A distinction between the deserving and undeserving has been in some respects a distinguishing, and in many others, divisive, feature of the social work profession. The apparent distinction has traditionally been drawn on the basis of ethical and moral appraisals of virtue and vice. This tradition has a much longer pedigree dating from antiquity in which considerations of personal desert were crucial, indeed decisive, in redistributive and retributive justice (Zaitchik 1977). Over the passage of time, moral authority has yielded more and more power to knowledge (Foucault, 1973). Rationality has superseded dogmatism, and the assessment of those eligible for welfare has been well honed. Although income and means tests form the official basis for distributing welfare, whether or not moral desert has been abandoned remains in question. However, how might desert be managed, if it does indeed continue to exert a powerful, albeit covert, influence on claims to state-provided or sponsored welfare? One possible answer to this question follows, first by noting the obvious, though, unappreciated importance of, desert, followed by a discussion of its integral relation to justice, and finally outlining how social work could use it as a normative force. / The full text may be made available on permission from the publisher.

De ekonomiska klyftorna i Sverige växer i stadig takt, samtidigt som den svenska ekonomin i övrigt går väldigt bra. Men vad händer med de som drabbas av fattigdomen? Hur konstrueras den fattigas position i samhället? Den här studien syftar till att utreda hur ekonomiskt utsatta människor representeras och problematiseras i dagens populärkultur. Utifrån maktens tredje ansikte undersöks därför tv-programmet Lyxfällan med särskilt fokus på att analysera subjektspositioner och subjektifieringseffekter. Ytterligare undersöks vilka maktrelationer som skapas och reproduceras i Lyxfällan. Till sin hjälp stödjs studien av ett teoretiskt ramverk vilken beskriver hur fattigdom representerats genom historiens lopp samt vilka eventuella effekter det skapar i det politiska livet. Särskilt fokus ligger på att undersöka huruvida vi i Sverige använder oss av diskursen ’undeserving poor’. Materialet som undersöks är ett urval av Lyxfällans avsnitt under 2017. Studiens resultat visar att den diskurs som upprätthålls i Lyxfällan har inflytande på deltagares aktörsskap till det negativa. Slutsatsen av det här arbetet är att fattigdom har individualiserats vidare analyseras vilka konsekvenser det kan tänkas ha för politiken.

This dissertation is an analysis of observations among, and interviews with, Romanian and Swedish employees at a Swedish development aid project in Romania. The aim has been to study the categories of ‘humanity’: how the notions of the ‘human(e)’ and the ‘inhuman(e)’ were created in the context of the project. Further, the aim of the thesis has been to connect the relations in everyday life as it develops in an aid project to the social and societal processes of change in today’s Europe. Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the study. Chapter 2 analyses media representations of institutionalized children in Romania, and describes the development aid in Romania. Chapter 3 describes and analyses the practical work with the children in the everyday life of the project. Chapter 4 focuses on the locally employed project staff, and their adoption of a ‘more human(e)’ identity through working with the Swedish NGO. Chapter 5 analyses how the construction of difference took place in the everyday life of the development aid project. Chapter 6 analyses the development aid as exchange of gifts and applies models of analysis of social work with the so-called deserving and undeserving clients. Chapter 7 is a concluding chapter. The construction of the ‘human(e)’ and its opposite, the ‘inhuman(e)’, could be found on three levels. These categories were used in reference to: (1) the children, the sick elderly and the poor families that were the clients of the aid project and were expected to be ‘humanized’ in the course of project implementation; (2) the Romanians who were employed by the Swedish organization and who were to be humanized through their work and through learning Western views on what the human being is; and (3) by implication, the whole Romanian society and all the Romanians who were also to be ‘humanized’ through the intervention of the Western NGOs.