Helter-Shelter: Security, Legality, and an Ethic of Care in an Emergency Shelter

Helter-Shelter is an ethnographic account of the manner in which an emergency shelter is governed on a daily basis, from the perspective of the personnel who are employed and tasked with providing care.

Prashan Ranasinghe focuses on how the founding ethos of the shelter, an ethic of care, is conceptualized and practiced by examining its successes and failures. Ranasinghe reveals how this logic is diluted and adulterated because of two other important logics, security and legality, which, w...