Entanglements of faith: Discourses, practices of care and homeless people in an Italian City of Saints

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0042098013514620This paper investigates how Catholic-inspired services for homeless people are delivered in Turin, Italy. The purpose is to critically interrogate particular faith-based organisations’ moral discourses on homelessness, and to show how they are enacted through practices of care directed at the homeless subject. The paper contributes to the geographical literature on faith-based organisations addressing its shortcomings – namely the lack of critical and contextual focus on faith-based organisations’ ‘love for the poor’. To address this point, the paper takes a vitalist perspective on the urban and introduces the notion of the ‘entanglements of faith’, which allows an integrated and grounded perspective on faith-based organisations’ interventions. The outcomes of the work suggest that these faith-based organisations propose standardised services that, producing particular assemblages and affective atmospheres, have deep emotional and relational effects on their recipients. Further lines of research are sketched in the conclusions

Mortal Questions: Geographies on the other side of life

ArticleCopyright © 2014 by SAGE PublicationsDrawing upon resources from philosophy, sociology, history, and anthropology, this paper explores the possibilities of attending to geographies on the other side of life. After an introductory review of work on deathscapes and extant geographical reflections on absence and loss, the paper turns to consider three horizons in which geographers might extend their interrogations of different mortal conditions: mourning, the spatial politics of the dead, and corporeality. The paper concludes by reflecting on the disciplinary possibilities of responding to these empirical concerns at a time when we are often asked to cultivate all manner of lively geographies