Scales of Care: Reproducing LGBTQ+ Safety, Knowledge and Practice in Detroit

Abstract

This dissertation examines one non-profit organization in metropolitan Detroit as its vision shifts from producing “safe space” for LGBTQ+ youth to “creating a world where LGBTQ+ youth are safe wherever they are.” In taking on this project, which involves practically and discursively shifting the scales of care this LGBTQ+ youth center provides, social service and healthcare practitioners encounter intersecting sets of double binds, emerging from oppositions between visibility and erasure for Black LGBTQ+ young people, between state recognition and surveillance, between expertise derived from professional authority and lived experience, between objectivist paradigms and situated knowledges, and between mutual aid and state-mediated social services. This research analyzes how practitioners respond to these double binds and the practical, ethical, and epistemological work this entails. Methodologically, this dissertation is based on over two years of ethnographic research, including extensive participant-observation in organizational activities, in-depth interviews with professional practitioners of various kinds, document and artifact analysis, and photoethnography. In examining how practitioners encounter and respond to these emerging double binds, navigating the concomitant promise and risks of their work, I describe the everyday forms of paradoxical practice they enact, variously contending with, embracing, and working against these oppositions as the specificity of the situation requires. Ultimately, I find that enacting good care in this context involves moving closer towards practitioners’ ambivalence and attending more fully to the double binds they encounter in their practice. In this way, I argue that this approach to practice is a fundamentally pragmatic one, contributing to a particular tradition of American pragmatism in the United States and in the city of Detroit.