Shame,Anger and Hope: The Messy Relations of Charitable Help within the Welfare State

Abstract

The shame of being poor and asking for charity has been a key theme in sociological research on poverty. This article draws on ethnographic research across two charity centres in Australia to address the overemphasis on shame as the dominant feeling of being poor and trying to help. We find that hope and anger are key emotions that sit alongside shame. Service providers tried to cultivate hope for a brighter poverty-free future. Hope was important for people in poverty, but they had smaller versions of hope informed by their everyday struggle. They were also angry at hope lost. Participants co-constructed charity and their experiences of poverty as a messy problem space where difficult and hopeful emotions hang together. The article contributes to the literature by coupling ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ feelings of poverty to trace a ‘political economy of hope’ within the welfare state that nuances people’s experiences of charitable help.

Introduction

The shame of being poor and asking for charitable help has been a key theme in sociological research on poverty. In people’s descriptions of their poverty, shame resounds with feeling unworthy and demoralised, eroding people’s sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy (Walker et al., 2013). However, being shamed is not a unilateral process: the literature highlights how people actively strive to avoid, negate or resist shame and stigma (Strong, 2021; Walker et al., 2013). Charity organisations are key spaces where feelings of shame are evoked and managed. People experiencing poverty, for example, will often describe how they ‘swallowed their pride’ to access charitable help despite their initial reluctance (Ali et al., 2018).

Charity spaces can reproduce social norms around the grateful and deserving poor and reinforce social hierarchies (Garthwaite, 2016). The expectation that people in need will demonstrate the appropriate emotional response reflects the unequal relationship between the giver and the receiver. Importantly, however, these uneven relationships need to be understood as deeply embedded within neoliberal welfare policy that on the one hand aims to encourage self-responsibilised citizens to take care of themselves, while on the other hand retracts funding for state and non-government welfare organisations to support those on the margins. In the Australian welfare state for example, these overlapping practices manifest in a persistent refusal across the political spectrum to raise social security payments to above the poverty line along with other limited social supports such as consistent underinvestment in social housing. These welfare policy practices create conditions where the everyday realities of being poor force people to access charitable help from a volunteer who wields power by virtue of their voluntary care. Further, charity is not just a ground–up and distinct response to poverty-sustaining welfare provision. As Parsell et al. (2021) argued, charity is an integral part of the welfare state. In Australia, state reductions in income support and other welfare measures fit hand-in-glove with direct support to charities and the valorisation of the charitable as signifying the ideal society. Seeking essential resources from charity, such as food and clothing, is thus inseparable from the welfare state, or a means of reassembling the social in accordance with neoliberal ideals of sociality (Parsell and Clarke, 2022). The recipient of this charitable care is not demonised in political discourse, but rather pitied and conveyed as the impoverished with no agency. This positioning of the vulnerable recipient of charity vis-a-vis the ethical charity providers exacerbates the shame felt by the former.

While focusing on shaming encounters underlines how political rationalities and policies partially shape the everyday possibilities for people living on the margins, the literature does not always capture the diverse range of emotions evoked and mobilised in situations where people are marked out as being poor. Shame is prioritised as an all-encompassing emotion, with other emotions forming part of the set of reactive strategies to manage feelings of shame. Benjamin (2020) argued that the overemphasis on shame assumes that recipients agree with the dominant narratives about their lack of worth or deservingness. Focusing on negative emotions can also undermine marginalised people and communities’ attempts at making their lives liveable (Back, 2015). However, attending to more ‘positive’ emotions does not necessarily negate these issues. First, Friedli and Stern (2015) illustrated how positive affect can be part of the welfare state’s arsenal to stigmatise the poor and diminish dissent. Second, focusing on positive emotions to counter destructive poverty concentrates on people’s coping behaviours, which may reinsert normative expectations that people should make do under challenging circumstances (Mitchell, 2022). Examining how poverty and charitable encounters feel involves remaining sensitive to the mundane practices of (trying to) help. This requires staying with the tensions between positive and negative emotions, and relations between the givers and receivers of charitable help, within the context of the welfare state that makes these charitable encounters necessary.

This article contributes to the sociology of poverty by examining the everyday feelings of being poor, charitable care and the ‘political economy of hope’ in these settings. We draw on Desmond (2014) to see charity as an active and dynamic social space constituted by the relations between two groups in different social positions within the larger field of the Australian welfare state. A ‘charity space’ focuses on charity not as an object but as a dynamic interaction that binds givers and receivers together. This is useful for our research because we are interested in the feelings that come with asking for help, and giving help, and which can be understood as enabled by the charity space. Focusing on how everyday poverty feels is important; as Hitchen (2016: 103) explained in relation to austerity, ‘everyday life matters’ because austerity ‘is something that is experienced by living beings, and therefore, is understood through [emphasis in original] individuals’ lived and felt [emphasis added] realities’. We recognise the vast literature that distinguishes emotions, feelings and affect, but we follow researchers like Ahmed (2010) and Wetherell (2012), who study what emotions/feelings/affects do instead of what they are. We take emotions/feelings/affect as a departure point to trace how structures ‘get under our skin’ (Ahmed, 2010: 216). As we explore in the literature, emotions are more than individual experiences: what can be felt and what is supposed to be felt are partly enabled by situations, spaces and institutions. Accordingly, we paraphrase Cvetkovich (2012: 5) and ask, how does the welfare state feel for those who are forced to access charity and how do volunteers rationalise and enact charitable help? We analyse stories of being poor and helping people in poverty that hold together the destructive elements of poverty-creating systems, the anger at being left behind and the hope for something else.

Shame, Anger, Hope and Poverty

Shame is a useful analytical focal point to study how poverty feels because it blurs the boundaries between the private and the public by linking individual distress with social norms. Shame signals a ‘belowness’ (Strong, 2021: 74); a perceived failure to reach culturally inflected social standards such as independence and autonomy (Parsell et al., 2021), active citizenship and paid work (Peterie et al., 2019a) or gendered familial norms such as the ‘good mother’ (Ali et al., 2018). Shame can highlight how emotions are part of a governing toolbox. State actors can wield shame to mobilise people who are poor to embody ‘ideal’ traits such as self-responsibility (Tyler, 2018). These productive elements of shame can be reproduced relationally, particularly between charity providers and receivers, but it can also be mitigated by the practices of people trying to help (Parsell and Clarke, 2022). How it feels to be poor is partly a product of social norms that underpin welfare institutional practices and the relations between those who give and receive help.

Taking a more productive lens shows that shame is not an inevitable end-state of being in poverty or engaging with charity (Strong, 2021). Anger is one emotion to deflect or negate shame. The literature presents a combination of people feeling anger because they feel they have ‘done wrong’ and ‘been wronged’. Ali et al.’s (2018) research showed that shame provoked feelings of anger when people living in poverty felt they had not lived up to parenting norms (doing wrong) or when engaging in welfare practices they found belittling (being wronged). This anger was reflected inwards in how people internalised institutionally produced shame. However, anger can be reactive to the practices and people that try to enforce social norms. Anger can be ‘triggered’ by shame-inducing situations, but unlike shame, anger is a ‘deviant’ emotion that is an inappropriate response to charity or welfare practices (Redman, 2023; see also Power et al., 2011). In Australia, unemployed people expressed anger that welfare agents positioned them as ‘dole bludgers’ (Peterie et al., 2019b), even though it could result in sanctions for acting inappropriately (Stambe, 2022). Peterie et al. reframed unemployed anger from ‘deviant’ to ‘defendable’, an understandable resistance to the welfare ‘feeling rules’ about maintaining a positive attitude despite labour market conditions.

The links between shame and anger connect the private and the personal to social norms and values and appropriate emotional displays. The expression of ‘being wronged’, and the situations where anger erupts, necessarily draw into the analysis the institutionalised and systematic components of poverty. Following ‘positive emotions’, especially those provided by givers of charity, can illuminate alternative ways of thinking about how poverty feels. For example, charitable volunteers use care, laughter and confession to call into question dividing lines between the deserving and undeserving poor (Strong, 2021).

Hope is another ‘positive’ emotion mentioned in studies on poverty. Hope can be loosely defined as the anticipation of the possible (Kleist, 2022). Hope is future-orientated, but unlike expectation, it is a desire for what could be without any certainty that the desired outcome will be realised. The elusive character of hope makes it a potentially powerful tool for inciting change at social and individual levels. Hope is evoked in discourses around ‘emergency’ to articulate what is undesirable and to demand social change (Anderson, 2017). Individuals can also use hope to navigate the precariousness of their work lives by aligning their self-image and how they frame their work with their moral values, enabling them to persist despite work insecurity (Alacovska, 2018). Health sociological research shows how hope can help to give meaning in everyday life despite terminal illness (Mattingly, 2010). This body of literature highlights that ‘hope’ may be more than big picture imaginaries about prosperity and change. Hope can be an individual psychosocial resource for dealing with the adversities in people’s lives by encouraging people to persevere, thus making the present hardship bearable (Zigon, 2009).

The cultivation of hope to endure hardship is contentious. Hope is not only wielded by individuals, but it can also be situated within broader contexts where hope is unevenly distributed (Hage, 2009). The gap between the present and socially desirable futures creates space for ‘ideological intervention’, which can be utilised to reinforce social norms (Hage, 2009). Importantly, the future-focused orientations of hope can maintain the status quo by acting like a placeholder, failing to disrupt the conditions that create the adversities of the present. Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen (2019: 645) argued that ‘hope and hopefulness are offered to those whom the world is unable or unwilling to offer anything else’.

Staying with health sociology, researchers have applied a ‘political economy of hope’ to explore how various actors, institutions and processes unite and make investments through discourses of hope around potential treatments. Such hopefulness is attached to ‘enthusiasm for medicines possibilities . . . through the production of ideas with potential although not yet proven therapeutic efficacy’ (DelVecchio Good, 2001: 397). The presentation of possible solutions intertwines concerns about what can be considered hope-worthy, ‘who’ gets to hope and how these ideas function in the present (Peterson, 2015). Like shame and anger, ‘hope’ can be another analytical focal point to study how poverty feels and link the personal with the structural.

Taken together, this literature highlights how tracing individual feelings about being poor and accessing charity involves focusing on how such feelings are made possible from the dynamic conditions that enable charitable encounters and the welfare state more broadly. It also highlights the relationality of these spaces and the potential radical effect of collegial effort to unpack and upend the social norms and practices that negatively impact people in poverty. When reading across the literature on how it feels to be poor both negative and positive feelings are involved. By prioritising feelings of shame over other emotions, we miss how emotions sit together with messy and unresolved implications. Consequently, when examining the felt realities of everyday poverty it is essential to attend to how social norms, welfare practices and attempts to help, reshape people’s lived and felt realities. We chose to backstage shame to explore anger and hope to see how ‘social formations grab people’ (Wetherell, 2012: 2) and how the welfare state gets under people’s skin (Ahmed, 2010). We take up Cook and Cuervo’s (2019) call to explore how the health-focused ‘political economy of hope’ could be reworked for more general use. We apply a political economy of hope to poverty settings and charitable help.

Methodology

We aimed to study people’s experiences and feelings about receiving and giving charity. The broader study aimed to understand how church-based charities live their faith to help people in poverty and how people living in poverty engaged with, avoided and made meaning of the help they received from a faith-based charity. A relational ethnographic approach was used to understand how helping plays out in practice and how people accessing help feel about their life circumstances, being helped and what they need now and in the future. We draw on Desmond’s (2014) relational ethnography because we see the focus of understanding how it feels to be poor in the Australian welfare state forces people into relationships with charities. Charity is inherently relational because it necessarily involves a giver and provider, but these relationships are uneven and bound together in charity spaces that imply mutual dependence and can involve struggle (Desmond, 2014: 554).

We conducted the study with The Salvation Army (TSA) one of the largest providers of government-funded social care. We focus on the voluntary work provided by pastors and their volunteers at two Australian church-based community centres. One church-based community centre was in an area that the Australian Bureau of Statistics ranks as the most socially disadvantaged in Australia, whereas the second was in the outer suburb that scores above the median for social disadvantage. The two church-based community centres are led by pastors and some paid staff but are mostly staffed by volunteers. They provide a range of charitable services, including social gatherings, groups and food, clothing, supermarket vouchers and government-funded emergency relief pre-loaded debit cards. The research commenced in September 2019 and then paused in February 2020 due to COVID-19. It recommenced in April 2021 and ended in November 2021.

We completed 42 in-depth interviews across the two sites. Eighteen were with people accessing help, 19 were either paid or in a voluntary position and five were pastors or chaplains. Six of the service providers and nine of the service users were male. The ages ranged from mid-20s to late 60s. As part of the ethnographic fieldwork, some people were interviewed multiple times to capture their ongoing experiences with accessing help, helping others or sometimes both. One person accessing help and volunteering was interviewed four times (Larissa), another was interviewed twice, three providers were interviewed twice and all others were interviewed once. Interviews ranged from 20 minutes to three hours, averaging 60 minutes. Service users were asked about how they feel about their current living situation or encounters with charity. Service providers often talked about how it felt to help people who are poor or whom they struggle to help. We would also reflect feelings to participants to ensure what we were ‘hearing’ matched the feelings they were communicating.

We also completed approximately 95 days of participant observations covering multiple aspects of the community centres. We had informal conversations with volunteers, staff and service users; participated in team meetings or handover for new pastors, participated in community activity groups and observed or helped out with mundane daily tasks such as cleaning or making coffee. We attended to the everyday interactions between service users and service providers, paying attention to the emotional encounters, struggles and tensions. We also conducted participant observation around the local communities, this mostly involved having coffee at cafes or spending time with some of the participants in their homes at their invitation. During the several COVID-19 lockdowns, we would also have telephone conversations with some participants.

The in-depth interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Observations were recorded in a fieldwork journal, including informal conversations, either in the field or later that day. We analysed all data thematically. We took an inductive approach and open coded the data, before identifying patterns and emerging themes. Both authors were involved in the analysis process, and we would meet to discuss the ongoing themes to further develop themes as well as ensuring themes represented the data. We analysed data to scrutinise how service users experienced accessed charitable help as well as how service providers described and enacted this help. We paid attention to emotions identified or implied and what these emotions did or how they functioned.

The research received full ethical clearance from the authors’ university. Central to ethics approval was a commitment to make ongoing efforts to ensure participants and the community knew we were engaging in overt ethnographic research and to ensure people had the option to not participate. We would occasionally act as advocates for service users as they navigated charities and welfare organisations. We recognised that as researchers we are not just passive observers but also actors participating in the research space, affecting and being affected by people’s stories of suffering (Shaw et al., 2020). This came to the fore with one participant, Larissa. Early in the fieldwork Larissa asked if she could become a research volunteer. She was angry at her mandatory welfare requirement to ‘volunteer’ in a thrift store. Recognising our own positionality as employed, middle-class researchers, we wanted to make space for Larissa and ensure her volunteering ‘counted’. We registered the study with the government authority and our university’s internal processes. We were only required to report annually that the welfare client was a volunteer. We signed off Larissa’s volunteering, while also reiterating that she could withdraw from the research at any time. Larissa’s participation invited a co-design element into the research. Larissa was able to present a problem and solution that encouraged us to refine our research practices to accommodate her needs in a way that Larissa deemed beneficial (Steen, 2013). All service users were offered this same opportunity. Names provided are pseudonyms.

Findings

Hope

Using Relationships to Transform ‘Shame’ into ‘Hope’

‘Hope’ was integral to how charity service providers described their personal stories of helping. It formed part of the framework through which they understood their daily tasks, about who should be helped, how this helping should be done and dovetailed into dominant social norms about which hopeful futures could be imagined. They wanted to give hope to people who are poor to change how they feel and how they act.

Service providers were keenly aware that service users were ashamed to access charity. In actively responding to such feelings, providers tried to envision and enact a service delivery model that moved away from the transaction of giving and receiving charity. They sought to reframe the ‘us versus them’ dynamic and flatten the social hierarchy so service providers and service users would be equal in their ‘journeys of brokenness’. The cause of poverty, according to providers, was not so much a lack of material goods but broken relationships.

Accordingly, they aimed to shift their focus from a ‘needs-based model’ to what they called a ‘Jesus-based model’. They wanted to cease providing donated fresh produce. Moving away from addressing people’s material neediness, and the associated shame, could be transformed by providing hope through relationships. The objective for the Jesus-based model was thus: ‘We are building a thriving community of belonging and welcome where the love of Jesus is experienced’ (Fieldnotes, 13 October 2021). Thriving equated to breaking the poverty cycle through, ‘changes that are sustainable and allow self-determination and empowerment for a long time’. For this participant, the Jesus-based model would support people on their ‘journey of transformation’. The hope was for a future of independence, without having to ask for charitable help.

Hope for a life out of poverty was underpinned by materialist and normative expectations of the modern Australian society. Providers engaged in a ‘social hope’ or a collective imaginary of a good life (Kleist, 2022). For example, Pastor Malcom detailed the tale of a boy’s school suspension for violence and how the child was transformed through relationship:

[the young boy] said, ‘I’ve never been told all my life by anybody that I was loved.’ . . . I believe that was a turning point. He’s a civil engineer today . . . married with two children, living a good life. So there is hope.

The story of the young boy was used to show how relationships could change people’s behaviours and future outcomes. But the hope volunteers would try to enact in their daily encounters was often smaller, and more about helping people through the present. For example, leaders would use team meetings and devotions to draw from scripture and anecdotes to remind charity volunteers of their key task to help with hope:

Pastor Nancy talked about an American podcast that she listens to and this one episode that was on thermometers and thermostats. She asked the group to identify the difference. However, before hearing an answer she said the thermometers were about determining ‘what is’ or to ‘take the temperature’ of what is really happening in a place. As an example, she said people act like thermometers when they say, ‘what’s what’ and ‘just look at the facts’. Then she said thermostats are there to change the temperature. She said they, as ‘people of hope’ should aim to be thermostats, to try and change the mindset for people, inviting them to be hopeful. She said this doesn’t mean not acknowledging the present distress, but it is about looking to see ‘what could come next’. (Fieldnotes, 9 October 2021)

In the above fieldnotes, enacting hope was about both attending to the regimes of facts and the regimes of hope (Brown, 2005). They were to acknowledge the present by acknowledging people’s current distress, but ‘changing the temperature’ was about adjusting people’s focus from the present to the future, helping people to hope by imaging what ‘could come next’. Temporally, ‘hope’ is here much closer than the reference to thriving in the Jesus-based model, and it has an instrumental purpose to help people deal with present hardships (Zigon, 2009). Yet, the challenges of helping people through hope are also demonstrable at this same point: the disjuncture between the current and what could be and the unclear boundaries between hope and suffering. In Kevin’s account, which we discuss below, he presents a more nuanced and messy understanding of helping with hope, and how it feels to live in poverty.

Kevin’s Hope

Here we examine how the sense of creating hope feels for service users. We focus on Kevin’s account because he was both a provider who endorsed the Jesus-based model but also in need of help himself. Kevin was on the disability support pension, unemployed and struggling with his alcohol addiction. Kevin was singled out by Pastor Nancy during the thermostat devotion where she provided an example of what changing the temperature could look like:

As Pastor Nancy elaborated [on being thermostats], her stare seemed to fall on Kevin. When I first noticed this, I thought that it was just because Kevin was sitting directly across from Nancy but then as she talked about the importance of ‘holding the hope’ and the impact it may have on the community she spoke directly to Kevin. Nancy told him that many of the community members [service users] had noticed that he had not been in for a several weeks and had told her that they missed seeing his smile. Edmund said ‘Amen’ and several people agreed and nodded their heads. The only thing Kevin said was, ‘wow’. (Fieldnotes, 9 October 2021)

While Nancy presented a ‘next step’ for Kevin beyond his addiction, Kevin’s hope and the ‘temperature’ of his life were inseparable. In his interview, a couple of months after our first meeting, he retold a story of connecting with a community member who was struggling: ‘Because expressions like, “There’s no hope”, and I’m sitting there going, “Oh brother, there is, there is, there is, there is, there is.”’ The importance of being a person who has ‘lived it’ and can share those learnings was a resounding theme where volunteers would disclose parts of their hardship to reduce shame during hope-filled relationship building with service users. Hope was something Kevin could enact by sharing his ‘similar experience[s], preferably with a good outcome’.

Yet, as Kevin talked, his hope became smaller and more complicated. He explained: ‘the hope for me is that they can see someone else has been there, done that, and is not doing too bad at the moment. It’s not going to be all roses.’ The caution in Kevin’s tale connects to another part of his story where he explained he was born again in 2014, ‘which sounds like a long time ago, but you’ve got to remember the path I have followed. It’s been a bit like that.’ He made a zigzag pattern with his hand indicating that his journey was not a linear path of progress. Hope was evidenced through Kevin’s experience but also mediated by it.

Kevin’s granular hope was tied into his past and current sufferings, making his future paler. Two weeks before his interview he rang Rose (first author) on a Sunday afternoon about scheduling an interview. Kevin was experiencing delirium tremens from alcohol withdrawal or, as he called it, ‘riding the ghost train’. He had a four-day bender during a COVID-19 lockdown and did things he ‘regretted’. Kevin’s despair grew during the phone call, and at one point, Rose asked if he was suicidal, to which he answered with an unequivocal ‘no’:

He said he had done these [alcohol withdrawals] many times, and each time, it was physically and mentally hard. I asked what had helped before – if that could help this time – and he started to cry again, saying that [TSA] had helped him multiple times and saved his life. I asked if he wanted me to contact anyone, and he said he did not want me to speak to anyone; he would ride it out.

From Kevin’s account, the role of helping by holding hope was connected to his own granulated hope embedded within his experiences of suffering and the possibility of future pain. The proximity of his daily struggles meant that for Kevin hope and despair were intimately connected. When service users related hope to their situations, as Kevin did, the clear distinctions between positive and negative emotions were less distinct, complicating how using ‘positive’ emotions can undo ‘negative emotions’ (see Strong, 2021). This was particularly the case for anger, which we turn to now.

Anger

Anger at Hope Lost

We encountered a lot of anger in our fieldwork. People described being angry at welfare administrative processes and managing the consequences of system failures. Anger was more than reactive to being wronged or shamed; it was instrumental and transformational. For example, while standing in the line for emergency relief, one woman retold her frustration of trying to convince the child protection service (Child Safety) to remove her eldest son from her care. She saw her eldest son as dangerous to her other children and she understood Child Safety would deem him a risk and remove her other children if he did not leave. After her furious demands, he was placed into foster care. But then she said Child Safety wanted to bring him back to her care. She retold the story, acting out her conversation with the Child Safety Officer. She raised her voice and swore profusely as she demanded Child Safety follow their own principles about keeping children safe. She repeated what several other women told us – their anger was more than just a response to shame-inducing welfare practices – it helped them get things done.

For some of the female participants, anger was instrumental and transformational. In contrast to other research that showed how anger from service encounters was internalised as part of self-blaming practices (Ali et al., 2018), the women in our study narrated how their anger became part of how they understood themselves. Anger would soak in and get under their skin (Ahmed, 2010). Lucy relied on charity to get food for the week because the social security payments were so low she could not afford food and pay her rent and bills. The challenges of living in poverty created the need for Lucy to access charity to try and find solutions to her struggles:

Lucy said the [charity financial counsellor] was ‘useless’. Lucy said she had to go through the trauma of telling her story again only to be told they couldn’t help her because ‘there was no fat to cut’. She was told to ‘have a coffee, go for a walk’ and then finally, ‘change bank’. Lucy said she got angry and couldn’t think and she just yelled and swore at the counsellor. She said when she feels like she isn’t being heard she just gets so angry and now she just stays ‘prickly’ so people stay away from her. (Fieldnotes, 19 November 2021)

The infuriating encounters Lucy had with services because her welfare payments were poverty-sustaining changed how she understood herself as a subject and how she related to those around her. Lucy distinguished between her present and past self, ‘once upon a time when I had a life, and I was a decent, normal human being’ but now she was always angry:

And then people come up and they want to help me. And I just yell at them because I’m so defensive. I’m beyond, I’m toxic. I’m like, ‘Leave me the fuck alone.’ And it’s like, ‘I know you’re well meaning, but get out of my grill. I can’t deal with you and your well-meaning stuff while I’m trying to just breathe.’

Lucy was repeatedly resistant to being helped through hope and relationships and once snapped at Rose (first author): ‘[I] asked how she was going, she snapped back, “How do I look like I’m going? I’m broken!” She said she didn’t want to have to talk to anyone. I apologised and left her alone’ (Fieldnotes, 21 October 2021). Lucy’s anger reflected her lack of opportunity to have hope, and at the efforts of volunteers to instil hope. She stated, ‘It’s been so long, with such poverty, that I can’t breathe anymore’; ‘the things that I used to dream about and have opportunity to do are so far out of my access it’s unbelievable’. Lucy’s anger here is an anger at hope lost. While for Kevin, helping with hope was temporary and muted, for Lucy attempts to help with hope were unrealised as her current struggles made her ‘prickly’ and unreachable. Anger, like that of Larrisa’s, which we discuss below, is more than an ‘understandable response’ to the feeling rules of the welfare state. People’s living environments, and the lack of hope, made them angry subjects.

Larissa’s Anger

Larissa was 63 when we met her in mid-May 2021. She was a volunteer that came on Fridays to help distribute the donated fresh produce to people like her living below the poverty line. Larissa volunteered to get her share of the donated food: ‘well, if I don’t go to [TSA], like we do on a Friday, for fruit and veg and a few other little enjoyments, I’m in a bucket’.

Larissa told us of her frustration, and indignation at being on welfare provision, unable to get a job and being ‘left behind’, unable to afford private rental. Larissa’s anger was directed at a collective ‘you’ – the state, institutions and society in general. Larissa saw her poverty as something that was created by external forces. She fumed:

So, we’re not on a full pension because we’re too young, we can’t get a job because we’re too old or overqualified, and because we’re on [welfare], we’re often looked at as, ‘Well, why can’t you get a job?’ and you think, ‘Now, hang on a minute, I didn’t move the pension age. You, the government, moved the goalposts there and left, especially single women, so many of us, in our cars.’ There’s thousands of women out there, but they’ve just been badgered, left behind, ignored, put down, intimidated, patronised.

Larissa’s anger was at a system that created a vacuum where ‘women like her’, unattached and without adequate superannuation, too old for re-employment and forced to go through degrading welfare practices, were designated to the margins and ‘living on a pittance’. Larissa’s anger, like the resentment of Benjamin’s (2020) participants, grew from a sense of entitlement. Larissa did not see herself as having done wrong, instead she was wronged and abandoned by the state and society.

As similarly experienced by Lucy, Larissa’s anger was also directed at the lack of opportunity for hope. Larissa would often express a sense of urgency to find some possible future to be hopeful for and it merged with her anger at being left behind:

[Larissa] tells me she goes into Centrelink and says ‘job start’ (social security payment) is too low and she can’t live on it. They tell her that it’s only temporary and she needs to get a job, but Larissa says they don’t understand that she is ‘running out of time’ in her life and she doesn’t want to struggle until the end [of her life]. (Fieldnotes, 21 June 2021)

Larissa’s accounts were filled with examples of trying to get by on the Jobseeker payment. She was forced to engage with services, like faith-based charities, to get what she needed, and this was a sticky point for her. Like Lucy, she found charities’ wanting to converse and connect infuriating:

It’s hard for people to sit and talk, because we’re beggars. Okay? And self-esteem, ‘I’m here because I can’t afford to buy this, and you want me to sit and talk about what? The fact that I’m poor? Don’t you know that already?’

Larissa’s anger did fluctuate throughout the research and would often sit alongside her grief. She externalised her current circumstances as opportunities taken away, or lost, rather than having done wrong. On one occasion, we asked Larissa to tell us more about her story, especially the transition from sleeping in her car to getting public housing: ‘oh, can I think about that? . . . Because that will affect me, as in it’s all loss, grief . . . Gone. Title, gone, partner, gone, home, gone.’ The prospect of retelling her story was to go back through what had been taken away. But to talk about the future was also difficult; Larissa’s present was a reminder of all that she had lost. One day at her unit, after she confided she had been suicidal the week prior, Larissa went through the list of what she wanted to move away from (her neighbours, her unit, her poverty). As she talked, Rose (first author) noticed a newspaper advertisement on her wall for an expensive apartment with seaside views. We guessed that this was her hope. Rose made the decision in that moment not to mention the clipping as she sat on the couch with Larissa who was holding back tears. To drag a big social hope into the conversation was to ask Larissa to do the work; to reframe her feelings into more appropriate and comfortable emotions (Power et al., 2011). It could also present hope of a future that was more than uncertain, it was unrealistic. In this instance, hope may not help to deal with current pain; it could hurt.

The challenge for people working in the charity space was to find ways to enact hope in the face of people’s daily sufferings. In the church-based community centres ‘hope’ could be attached to moralisations and social imaginaries about ‘the good life’. But it also brought to light the difficulty service providers had in sustaining hope for others. Hope was worn thin by the ongoing issues people had and their repeated slumps into despair.

Larissa and Kevin were both supported at the charity centres. However, by the last two months of the research, their supporters’ hope had diminished. Larissa’s friend, Tanya, who introduced her to the church, grew weary of Larissa’s constant anger and distress. Kevin was still considered to be ‘drinking himself to death’ (Bronwyn, paid staff). The collective opinion was Larissa and Kevin had to take the next step on their own.

Discussion and Conclusion

Here we extend our empirical material to illustrate how social structures ‘get under our skin’ (Ahmed, 2010: 216). Studying what emotions ‘do’ is partly concerned with following the ‘sticky relations’ or how emotions bring together signs and bodies to reinscribe boundaries, show the impact of structures, injustice and policy, and how people work with or struggle against these to ‘open up possibilities of restoration, repair, healing and recovery’ (Ahmed, 2010: 191). We use a ‘political economy of hope’ to further examine how it feels to be forced to access charity because of living conditions that are shaped by policies, institutional practices and assumptions of the Australian welfare state.

Much of the research on ‘hope’ emphasises how individuals can keep going despite external circumstances (Alacovska, 2018; Zigon, 2009) or how communities can help sustain such effort (Mattingly, 2010). Yet, emotions are not just inner processes of individuals, but are activated and mobilised by situations, institutions and policy and the relations shaped within. A political economy of hope enables us to move past psycho-social explanations for the role of emotions in helping people withstand poverty and how hope can be mobilised and consumed as part of political agendas (Peterson, 2015). A political economy of hope highlights the socio-political implications of inciting citizens to adopt hopeful and optimistic outlooks, and the assumed positive and apolitical assumptions that are attached to such ‘hope-filled’ practices. Indeed, political economies of hope can ‘attune us to the ways in which inequalities are manifest through uneven distributions and experiences of hope’ (Cook and Cuervo, 2019: 1102). We follow Cook and Cuervo and expand on a political economy of hope from the ground up, to examine how hope functions as part of the welfare state within a charity centre, and how individuals work with and against it.

The unevenness of the relations within a charity space is a part of how shame manifests and is embodied. The ‘Jesus-based model’ of the charity centre aimed to undo these shame-provoking encounters by providing hope. Programmes that are framed in terms of providing hope set expectations about certain outcomes. Hope in this way can be performative in shaping thoughts and actions (Peterson, 2015). In our research, the charity providers deliberately tried to work with hope to inspire service users to keep going despite their circumstances. However, we found that other emotions complicated charitable care.

The explicit telos of the ‘Jesus-based model’ and acting like ‘thermostats’ was to create hope for service users. Yet, as in community development for Australian First Peoples, the constant promise of a new programme that could do something different and make substantial changes often dissolves into ‘disillusion and failure’ (Nuijten, 2004: 52). The resistance of participants like Larissa and Lucy to building relationships with charity reflects this point: their suffering was deeply material and constructed by the welfare state that sustains poverty. Tinkering with how charitable care was provided had limited scope to reshape such conditions. There are three main issues with this use of ‘hope’ to change how the welfare state feels.

First, hope was underpinned by social norms. Hope was described in ways that mirrored social imaginaries of ‘rags to riches’, that escape from poverty is possible. Hope evoked the ethical citizen – a person willing to engage in reshaping the self to fit with the neoliberal individual who is optimistically disposed towards personal volition: a determination to grow and advance. Hope reinserted the expectations and ideals of what people should want and how people should behave, particularly around wanting to move ‘up’ the social ladder (Hage, 2009).

Second, the nuances of the everyday realities of living and feeling poverty made a programme of hope both difficult to enact and contentious. Anger was a feeling that pushed back against service providers’ attempts to build relationships and inspire with hope. The chasm between ‘what could come next’ to ‘what will probably come next’ was a sticky point for some female participants. Focus on undoing shame missed how people did not always agree that they lacked deservingness, as observed by Benjamin (2020), and for some of our participants their anger demonstrated a recognition that poverty was being done to them by the inadequacy of the state. Anger was not seen as a way of coping or an understandable response (see Peterie et al., 2019a; Redman, 2023). The women did not like being angry, it was a mark on their bodies and their sense of self of how they had changed from poverty.

Third, while anger was not easily classifiable as a deviant or negative emotion, ‘hope’ was not entirely felt as positive. For Larissa, a desperate plea for a future to hope was mediated by the financial limitations of being on welfare. Her anger and grief for what she had lost was narrated as part of ‘being wronged’ by the state and society. The prospect of trying to undo her suffering through hope was a stark reminder of the reality of her present and unrealistic future. Kevin also captured this disparity between the hope for something else as he tried to explain how he inspired hope for others, that things could get better, but they may not. Kevin and Larissa’s narratives show how people were trying to cope and move forward, and people were trying to support them, but the conditions that shaped their lives limited how much work hope could do.

This article contributes to the literature by showing how simplistic approaches of undoing negative emotions with positive emotions were inadequate within the messy relations of the charity space and the conditions that force people to access charity. Health sociological research has highlighted that ‘hopefulness’, as it is produced and mobilised through policy, funding streams, organisations and treatments, should not always be positively valued. Hope can be utilised and beneficial for some who may benefit from the economy of hope (Peterson, 2015). While the everyday practices of the church-based community centres in our study actively reflected on their work to inspire and help people living in poverty, people’s realities of the welfare state made ‘hope’ a placeholder. Hope functioned to fill a void created by a complex set of failures – of familial breakdowns, insufficient social security and housing, and addiction. While charity’s mission to help people to hope and to thrive was well intentioned, the conditions that shape people’s lives, and the role of charity within the welfare state to evoke ethical citizenship, remained unchallenged.

The individualistic focus on hope to undo structural inequality and system failures is like presenting a new, unproven and untested treatment as the next potential cure. Hope, as part of a political economy, is part of the political and social norms that establish how we should feel and act as ethical citizens, and what it feels like when the state and the system fails. To change how the welfare state feels means actively restructuring the welfare state. Without this, programmes of hope as a form of charitable care remain deeply entrenched within the telos and machinations of the neoliberal society that valorise charity and the ideal ‘ethical citizen’ (Parsell et al., 2021), punish and sustain poverty through insufficient allocation of resources and punitive welfare policy (Parsell et al., 2021; Stambe, 2022) and utilise emotions like shame and disgust to reinscribe self-responsibilised subjectivities (Tyler, 2018). In the context of the ‘post-pandemic’ where rapid and generous policy changes lifted people temporarily out of poverty and into housing (Parsell et al., 2023; Stambe and Marston, 2022), the use of emotional programmes like hope to undo ‘negative feelings’ like shame or even anger is akin to admitting that the state and society are not willing to provide anything other than hope.