Relational solidarity on the Streets: Shared Vulnerability in Face-to-face Encounters

In a context of increased precarity and inequality, this paper focuses on ‘outreach' activities – the sharing of resources and support, time and conversation – between volunteers and homeless people in Lyon, France. Based on participant observation data over 18 months, with 18 Non-Profit-Organisations (NPOs), the focus lies on the face-to-face dialogic encounters between volunteers and homeless people. The first contribution highlights the centrality of vulnerability to social relations, and its possibilities to shift and challenge existing assumptions and categories of ‘the vulnerable'. By taking a processual view of dialogic organising in action, we argue that vulnerability is not fixed and static, but is co-created in interaction as a shared, two-way vulnerability that allows openness between one and the other, or it can be shut down through the creation of boundaries and blocks to connection. The second contribution bridges Levinas' emphasis on vulnerability being central to relationship with Bakhtin's dialogism. Prompted by Bakhtin's critique of monological discourse that categorises, and gives a fixed retrospective account, we explore the dialogic in relational dynamics on the streets. We argue that reading Levinas in relation to Bakhtin's dialogism allows us to open up a space for perceiving different voices, in dialogue, working through the challenges and possibilities of coming into relation with and recognition of each other.