The Door and the Window: Affect, Space, and Professional Boundaries in a Harm Reduction Service

Ethnographers have long demonstrated that the design of spaces such as streets and city infrastructure can enable or prevent drug-using communities from practicing harm reduction and accessing life-saving services. Yet there is limited research about how spatial dynamics enable or hinder harm reduction workers' capacity to provide care and enact self-care. Addressing this gap, this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork at a community health center in Melbourne, Australia, which provided injecting equipment, public health education, and overdose response to a street-based population of people who injected heroin. To better understand how staff grappled with the complexities of providing care in this context, we pay particular attention to the spatial and material aspects of the service, focusing on a door and a window in the center building. Workers used these objects to draw professional boundaries and enact affective breaks, enabling them to cope with emotionally demanding work, provide a unique brand of relational care, and maintain their own well-being. These moral-spatial boundaries were also flexible and porous and had to be constantly renegotiated. We argue that paying attention to affective and spatial dynamics within a government-funded service reveals the inherent predicament faced by staff caring for a group that is considered radically “other” by the state.