Abstract

How do we take care of homeless people? A field study with a humanitarian NGO, the Samusocial de Paris, France, gave the author the opportunity to observe nursing and social work with homeless people. The first part of the article recounts how the public problem of “grande exclusion” emerged in France and the kind of value judgments and controversies it gave rise to. He accounts for his tactics not to take sides for any of the definitions and evaluations available in the public sphere, and to deconstruct the genesis of the public policy of “social emergency” that was built in response to “grande exclusion”. The second part of the article keeps on drawing on pragmatism, shifting from Dewey’s The Public and its Problems to his Theory of Valuation . It describes social work and nursing as moral and political activities. Care is not only given in face to face relationships, it is also a distributed and coordinated activity, embodied into situational arrangements, made of procedures, technologies, institutions, and people. The author shows how a moral ethnography of outreach work with homeless people gives new insights on the valuation operations performed by professionals on the field. It opens new perspectives in the analysis of situated ethics, in connection with a sociology of public problems and public policies