Care at a Distance: Social Solitude, Emotional Capitalism, and Homeless Citizenship in Neoliberal Australia

This study examines how civic communities form and operate in contemporary urban Australia, with a focus on the intersection of care, distance, and citizenship among people experiencing homelessness. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at a nightly service site in Sydney, the study shows how emotional capitalism, affective austerity, and practices of social solitude shape relational life within the “homeless community.” While acts of care, such as sharing food, offering guidance, and resisting police intervention, generate temporary belonging and ontological security, they also unfold within broader welfare transformations that emphasize autonomy, risk management, and self-responsibility. By tracing how appreciation, cynicism, and emotional restraint coexist with care, the study complicates the binaries of solidarity versus individualism and demonstrates how fragile, situational forms of togetherness take shape under conditions of precarity. It argues that community in marginalized urban spaces is produced through the tension between care and distance, yielding ambivalent modes of belonging and horizontal citizenship.