Commoning describes a means of forging common value in the shared labour by which new experiences of community, of being in common, are realised. It is usually understood by way of a congeries of habits, affects and practices critical of normative models of social and economic organisation typical of late capitalism. These innovations have provided scholars and activists with productive ideas for imagining postcapitalist futures, and new ways of organising the labour required to achieve them. Yet it is arguable that two key problems remain in contemporary theorisations of commoning. First, in attending to the social and political contours of specific instances of commoning, it is rarely clear how commoning differs from other forms of social and community organisation. Second, despite longstanding identification with anticapitalist goals, the particular means by which commoning comes to express a distinctive political praxis are uncertain. The paper addresses the first of these problems by developing a novel account of the affective labour of commoning informed by Ben Anderson’s work on attachment, and Isabelle Stengers notion of “sense in common.” I address the second by way of Jacques Rancière’s account of subjectification understood as a “reconfiguration of the field of experience.” I argue that commoning evinces a mode of political praxis to the extent that it expounds a “wrong” in Rancière’s terms by which new subjects emerge as “parties” to the work of redefining a field of experience. I put these conceptual advances to work throughout my analysis by indicating how commoning may sustain new ways of “honouring country” in Naarm, reconfiguring the field of Indigenous relations in Victoria.

This paper argues that efforts to assess the outcomes of social care delivery ought to emphasise the generation of affective value. This value derives from the affective labour of caregiving - and the novel subjectivities that are the principal expressions of this labour - as it is organised in the delivery of social support. We ground this claim in analysis of qualitative data collected within housing assistance, community mental health, and substance use treatment services in New South Wales and Victoria. In presenting our findings, we highlight links between the affective labour of caregiving, the embodied and relational experiences of care in organisational settings, and the ways participants spoke of the outcomes of this work. We argue that these findings offer important new insights into the value of social care during a period of profound transition in the Australian care economy. Shaped by the ongoing marketisation of service delivery across this economy, efforts to formally assess the impact of social care in Australia are increasingly cast in terms of measurable service outcomes. Our analysis highlights what these measures often miss. Beyond the transactional service outcomes common to existing evaluation frameworks, we seek to highlight the affective value of care by indicating what else the labour of caring for vulnerable individuals may be shown to afford. Social care yields affective value to the extent that it facilitates the emergence of subjects with the sensitivities, capacities and 'self-awareness' necessary for the realisation of service goals like wellbeing, belonging, security, hope and recovery. We close by assessing the implications of this analysis for thinking about the value of social care delivery, and how it comes to matter.

What this research is about: this research Inquiry looked at how to change Australia's housing assistance system into one that supports 'housing pathways'. Housing policy makers often see 'pathways' as how households move between different tenancies and tenures, including social housing and emergency housing. However, it is useful to think of pathways as the different experiences households have with their housing and their housing aspirations. This helps us think about how housing assistance can support housing pathways and how the social housing system can better support households. Why this research is important: a better system for socially supported housing pathways could focus on supporting each person and household's needs and goals, rather than being constricted by access to a small number of social housing homes. With social housing getting much-needed extra funding, it is important to also improve how the system works with households that need help.

Alcohol and other drug residential rehabilitation is an abstinence-based modality for assisting people with longstanding concerns associated with their substance use. While ubiquitous, models of care in residential rehabilitation services vary widely and the impacts of the care delivered within them remain contentious. Critically, therapeutic processes in residential rehabilitation remain under-theorised with little attention given to the characteristics of "good care" within these settings. To examine this, an extended period of ethnographic fieldwork was conducted at one residential rehabilitation service in Eastern Australia, involving forty-one indepth interviews with residents and staff, observations and documentary analysis. Drawing on critical accounts of care derived from science and technology studies, our analysis details how caring well in residential rehabilitation was enacted through repertoires of: tailoring care to the needs and preferences of individuals; choreographing care to attend to the multiple and diverse needs that circulate in residential rehabilitation; and dialoguing care to attune to the needs of those enmeshed in care relations. These repertoires also facilitated care by mitigating the totalising tendencies of institutional care, and enhancing meaningful engagement across the residential community, improving access to therapeutic resources that accrue in the program over time. This analysis emphasises the programmatic flexibility and complex, resource intensive relations necessary for the expression of "as-well-as-possible care". It also alerts stakeholders to how systems of care both condition needs and enact vulnerabilities, challenging us to envisage new systems and relations to enable people to live better lives in accordance with their needs and preferences.

Recent discussions of social infrastructures provide rich insights into the ways health and social care organisations deliver services in the care economy and the value and impact of these services. Social infrastructures are regarded both as means of providing social support, particularly in disadvantaged communities, and as outcomes of this support in that effective social care is known to promote social cohesion. This suggests that services may themselves function as social infrastructure, although the circumstances in which this occurs are far from clear. Indeed, little is known about the ways human services contribute to the organisation, maintenance or repair of social infrastructures, or how service users contribute to these activities. This article adds to these discussions by indicating how service delivery facilitates the material and affective organisation of social infrastructures with a focus on the role of formal and informal labour. I ground this discussion in analysis of qualitative data collected within housing assistance, community mental health and substance use treatment services in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. My findings identify links between the formal work of case-management, in which support is oriented towards the goals of recovery and inclusion, and the largely informal labour of a growing peer workforce that promotes relations of community belonging and attachment. Taken together, these activities connect sites of service delivery with practices of social inclusion in the work of maintaining and repairing social infrastructures capable of sustaining common lives.

In this paper, we build on literature examining care practices in harm reduction services to investigate some of the reasons why women who use drugs access, remain in or leave harm reduction services. Through the analysis of ethnographic fieldwork collected at two Danish harm reduction services, including 29 interviews with women who use drugs, this study examines how care is practised in these services, what conditions these practices and how women are affected by this care. Our findings indicate that care is enacted in material, social and affective practices and relations, including the provision of everyday necessities, bodily affection and staff expressions of concern and sympathy that promote belonging. However, these care practices are also conditioned by relations of control mediated by workplace factors, the impacts of national and organisational policies including ongoing resourcing challenges, staff understanding of care practices and intersecting dynamics of gender, ethnicity and class. Women's experiences of harm reduction services are mediated by their everyday struggles negotiating relations of care and control with significant implications for both the quality of care delivered in these sites and its impacts. We close by reflecting on the tensions between care and control in harm reduction programmes for women.

This article presents a discussion with Australian Iranian artist Hoda Afshar, in which we explore some of the social and political contexts of contemporary creative practice from a Deleuzian perspective. Our discussion references work from across Afshar’s career, though we focus on a recent exhibition ( The Fold) staged as part of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Triennial in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, in late 2023 into 2024. This exhibition featured works partially derived from Afshar’s investigations in the archive of the French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934), which included thousands of images of veiled Islamic women and men taken in Morocco in the 1920s. Employing diverse visual strategies and artistic techniques to restage these images, The Fold invites the viewer to question the political and aesthetic representation of marginal subjects, the colonist’s fascination with the veil, and the contemporary resonances these questions evoke. The title of Afshar’s exhibition has obvious Deleuzian echoes, though we also draw out wider references taken from Deleuze’s discussion of the ‘people to come’, including some of his own brief references to de Clérambault’s work in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. We preface this discussion by way of a brief introduction to Afshar’s practice, including relevant aspects of her training and exhibition history, while also touching upon the broader social and political interests that often feature in her work. We then explore the key resonances between these interests and our shared readings of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. We return to these themes in a brief conclusion where we offer some final thoughts on the contours of a Deleuzian creative life.

Purpose Across the public sector, and especially in the delivery of health and social care and support, practicing innovation is a difficult and seldom rewarding activity. The organisational barriers inhibiting innovation adoption in healthcare settings have been widely discussed. What is less well understood is what motivates staff to persist with innovation efforts despite these barriers. This paper contributes to recent studies of the role of care and compassion in innovation processes within social care settings not only to generate new insights into the motivations underpinning innovation efforts but also to help illuminate how staff overcome barriers to innovation. Design/methodology/approach We crafted a series of vignettes from our recent ethnographic studies of innovation across the health and social care sectors in Australia and Denmark, involving semi-structured interviews, observation and field notes. Within the Danish case, we explore an instance involving a formal organisational focus on identifying and sustaining innovation within local service deliver. With the Australian case, we present an informal approach, where the process of identifying and sustaining innovation derives from moments of spontaneous employee engagement and initiative. Findings Reflecting on the examples of “frugal innovation” presented in these vignettes, the major contribution of this study is to situate care and compassion as critical social, affective and material aspects of the practice of innovation in health and social care settings. Our analysis indicates how the practice of innovation is shaped by diverse relations of caregiving, where compassion emerges as a key source of motivation, aspiration and application that inspires staff to seek novel solutions to enduring healthcare challenges. Originality/value We develop our argument with reference to recent interdisciplinary orientations to care and compassion in the healthcare literature, incorporating contributions from feminist scholars and the ongoing articulation of feminist care ethics in the study of innovation.

Registered nurses are the largest single professional group working in the field of cancer care and support one of the most vulnerable patient cohorts in the healthcare system. Cancer nurses are known to experience high rates of burnout, but there are significant limitations to current research on the unique stressors experienced by this group of nurses, particularly since the emergence of COVID-19. This study employs the Job Demands Resource Model (JD-R model) to better understand the experiences of Victorian cancer nurses’ work and describe factors which ameliorate burnout and work-related stress. A multiple case study research design was used in this study, with two groups of cancer nurses making up a total of 30 participants, allocated to separate cases bounded by geographical location. A two-phase study of Victorian cancer nurses in metropolitan and regional healthcare services was conducted from 2019 to 2021. Data included field notes and in-depth interviews. Data analysis used a process of elaborative coding, with a pre-conceived coding framework based on the JD-R model. A combination of thematic analysis and storyline analysis was employed to analyse the data. A cross-case analysis of similarities and differences identified the job demands affecting cancer nurses, and conversely, any positive job resources which may buffer these demands. Job demands identified in both cases appeared to have similar causes but were more explicitly linked to poor resourcing in the regional case. Job resources identified in both cases were similar, but it was noted how few job resources were available to buffer the many demands inherent in cancer nurses’ work. This multiple case study found that the work of cancer nurses is high in demands and low in resources. Despite challenging work conditions, findings identified a highly engaged workforce. The job resources identified in this study suggest there are modifiable strategies to cultivate a supportive work environment for cancer nurses.

Introduction: Peer workers in the Alcohol and Other Drugs (AOD) sector play a vital role in harm reduction for people who use drugs (PWUDs); however, their experiences are often shaped by complex macro- and micro-risk environments. This study explores these environments and their implications for peer workers, particularly concerning stigma, legal barriers, and organisational culture. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 peers with lived-living experience of illicit drug use. Purposive sampling was employed, leveraging established peer networks and community organisations. Interviews (range = 42-90 mins) were conducted via Microsoft Teams, transcribed, and analysed. The iterative coding process involved deductive codes based on predetermined topics and inductive codes derived from identified themes. Results: Participants identified key systemic challenges, including peer stigma, limited career prospects, and the complexities of navigating legal frameworks that criminalise drug use, thereby undermining the efficacy of peer work. The interplay between regulatory frameworks and societal attitudes creates barriers to employment, which disproportionately affects people with drug-related offenses. The significance of collective connection as a source of safety and support was also highlighted, particularly through peer supervision, which fosters enabling environments that promote wellbeing. Discussion: Findings highlight the need for advocacy towards legal reform and the creation of inclusive organisational cultures. Recognising and valuing the LLE of peer workers is essential for enhancing harm reduction initiatives and promoting the wellbeing of PWUDs. Addressing these macro- and micro-risk factors, including the importance of peer supervision, can improve peer workers' efficacy in providing meaningful support within their communities.

Long-acting injectable depot buprenorphine is the latest opioid agonist therapy to be offered in Australia. There has been increasing scholarly interest in the lived experience of this treatment; however, the current qualitative research on this issue is limited to reports on the benefits and challenges individuals experience during treatment. This study expands and complicates this body of work by delving into the social, affective, and material aspects of the depot buprenorphine experience. By applying a Deleuzo-Guattarian framework to the analysis of 40 semistructured, open-ended interviews conducted with individuals who were either currently receiving depot buprenorphine, were in the process of discontinuing, or had discontinued treatment, we argue that depot buprenorphine is a technology of becoming situated within regimes of desire. That is, depot buprenorphine is a catalyst of social, affective, and material changes that is realized and dwells within a set of cocreated assemblages comprised of human and other-than-human actors. According to the regimes of desire at work within these assemblages, individuals in treatment pass through a series of thresholds that mark their becoming into different kinds of persons. Four critical thresholds emerged in participants’ reports of depot buprenorphine: thresholds of geography, freedom, the body, and abstinence. These thresholds opened up radical new ways of being for participants, with some being more positive than others. We close by discussing the implications our findings have for the ongoing delivery of opioid agonist therapies in Australia and elsewhere.

This AHURI research examines the participation of social housing tenants in developing social housing policy. With tenants increasingly presenting with more complex health, housing and social care needs, developing ways they can participate in social housing policy can lead to a range of positive benefits: from improving the way housing and associated essential social services are provided to giving tenants a heightened sense of autonomy and a stronger sense of belonging within their communities.The guiding principle for tenant participation is that those most affected by a policy or organisational decision ought to be involved in the decision making process. Internationally there is a relatively well-established understanding that complex systems, such as social housing systems, require the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders and that evidence-based policy making is best supported by including diverse voices such as lived experience experts and advocates.Successful tenant programs include understanding that tenants and housing providers can have different ideas of what participation should look like and what it should achieve; programs can be compromised by power imbalances between tenants and housing providers, which can limit tenant autonomy and also lead to conflict.For policy co-design to work well, there must be respect and recognition of the expertise of all participants involved in the policy making process, which may require workforce training and changing cultural norms.The research proposes sharing of best-practice examples of tenant participation and program practice guidelines between housing organisations and across sectors through a new Australian Housing Clearinghouse model.

This article focuses on the workplace experiences of peer workers with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in mental healthcare settings in Australia. Our article is located at the intersection of political, social, cultural, and legislative forces that have fostered the development of peer work as a paid profession. We draw on the concept of stigma to analyse findings from qualitative interviews with peer workers conducted in [state], Australia. By examining peer work in the broader context of lifeworlds of BPD, we address the interplay of work and professional identity, and the experience of a profoundly stigmatised diagnosis at this intersection.Our findings demonstrate the physical and emotional effects of stigma and how it produces boundaries and inequalities between peer workers and other health practitioners. These boundaries are reinforced by invisible markers that delineate what is expected, 'normal' and deemed professional in the workplace. Moreover, these same medico-socio-political relations help shape peer workers' identities and experiences. The development of peer workforces in mental healthcare service delivery is a prominent area of reform in Australia and internationally. Our research highlights the urgency of efforts to transform current socio-cultural-political relations that inhibit peer workers in their roles and impact workplace experiences.