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The Discursive Construction of Accessibility and its Implications for Outreach Work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2019

HANS GRYMONPREZ Open the ORCID record for HANS GRYMONPREZ [Opens in a new window] ,
KOEN HERMANS  and
RUDI ROOSE
HANS GRYMONPREZ
Affiliation:
Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy, Faculty of Psychological and Educational Sciences, Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Gent (B) Researcher ISOS, Department of Hand Social Care, AP University College Antwerp email: hans.grymonprez@ugent.be
KOEN HERMANS
Affiliation:
LUCAS & Centre For Sociological Research, KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45, 3000 Leuven (B) email: koen.hermans@kuleuven.be
RUDI ROOSE
Affiliation:
Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy, Faculty of Psychological and Educational Sciences, Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Gent (B) email: rudi.roose@ugent.be
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Abstract

Homeless individuals often find that welfare services are inaccessible, despite being designed to meet their needs. This frictions with access which is a fundamental principle in western welfare states. Adaptations in social policy and service delivery are therefore made to deal with the problem of inaccessibility to services and welfare rights. One such adaptation is outreach work and is often developed to engage with homeless people and link them up with available services. This raises questions on the transformative potential of outreach work to deal with those mechanisms which result in inaccessibility. We argue that in a context in which accessibility is increasingly guaranteed by rights-based frameworks, exclusion management is also increasing. This is due to hybrid developments in social policy and welfare ideology. Nonetheless, the initial transformational potential of outreach work never really vanished.

Keywords

outreach workaccesstransformationhomelessness
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 643 - 660
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

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