The Knowledge of Neglect: Reflections of Mothers Experiencing Homelessness in Dublin on Social Care Interventions Involving Their Children

This paper examines the reflections on caregiving provided by a group of Irish mothers who were homeless, struggling with addiction, and had lost primary custody of their children. Drawing on Das's (Slum acts. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2022) discussion of 'inordinate knowledge', or knowledge of real-life and morally dubious scenarios that resist attempts at resolution through philosophical reasoning, the paper explores how women in these situations grappled with the realisation of having neglected their children. I demonstrate my interlocutors' ongoing ethical self-evaluations and continued attempts to make amends for their earlier caregiving lapses, with the limited resources at their disposal. In so doing, I demonstrate how my interlocutors' yearning towards their children, as revealed through the process of reflexive caregiving action, became entwined with their trajectories through homelessness and addiction in Dublin. At the same time, I probe the limits of anthropologists' proclivity for contextualising and rationalising unsettling caregiving behaviours. Instead, inspired by my interlocutors' unflinching self-evaluation, this paper explores the moral quandaries which emerge as a result of care's polyvalent nature by asking if we can ever reconcile a mother's attempt to atone for her faltering engagement with caregiving with her child's experience of neglect.