The Pauluskerk is an important landmark in Rotterdam. It is a church, a day shelter and an activist organisation that focuses on the issue of homelessness. Mike Holleman, researcher at Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, is conducting research on how visitors of the Pauluskerk give meaning to this space. In this blogpost, Mike lays out his experiences and methodological considerations.
The Pauluskerk holds a unique position in Rotterdam. The church welcomes people who are excluded elsewhere, such as undocumented people, EU-labour migrants and Dutch homeless people who are stuck in bureaucracy. Most of these people are sleeping outside as they have no access to regular night shelter when the temperature is above 0 degrees. The church can offer a limited number of beds for mostly elderly, undocumented people and a day shelter in which basic healthcare and other help is available.
The Pauluskerk also operates as an advocacy organisation. Their upcoming “Right to Rest” campaign on 18 December for instance asks attention for the end of basic shelter for 45 undocumented people in Rotterdam, as closing this shelter could mean an increase in homelessness in Rotterdam.
Starting from being there
During the starting phase of my research, we talked with the Pauluskerk staff about the potentiality of doing research. Quickly the idea of reciprocity emerged: it felt essential to contribute something in return for the insights I would gain. As I was already active as a voluntary Dutch teacher at Pauluskerk we came up with the idea of creating a “language café” in the day shelter. This would serve as a space where visitors could practice basic Dutch, focusing on everyday phrases. The idea was inspired by the challenges posed by language barriers between visitors and volunteers. However, this initiative was a try-out: Would people living in survival mode be interested in learning a language? And would I be accepted in the day shelter if I wanted to talk about topics beyond the language café? While in this role, I sometimes noticed many requests all at once, while it was quiet other times. The quiet moments gave space to take up other voluntary tasks in which I was more in touch with healthcare and service-related questions.
Moving along
At the start of my research, I aimed to study healthcare and services provided in the Pauluskerk. However, as I talked to the visitors and staff, I realised that most visitors didn’t reflect on their experiences through that lens. Instead, their stories were far more complex, involving stigma, systemic injustice, precarious living conditions, and difficulty phrasing their needs. The staff and volunteers tell another story. In this narrative the Pauluskerk is named as a grey space, an in-between world where a lot of their practical efforts are put into getting people back into the system from which they’ve been excluded by law. However, for some individuals, this can take a lot of time if it ever happens. Additionally, a lot of ‘unmeasurable’ effort is put into giving people a place to rest. Thus, I wanted to move along with these stories and move away from the previous perspective of only service evaluations. I started to broaden my scope and looked at how visitors give meaning to the Pauluskerk as a space that also provides services and healthcare.
By spending some afternoons in the shelter, it became clear that traditional, one-moment-in-time interviews wouldn’t be able to voice their true experiences. I figured I needed to keep spending more time in the day shelter to get to know people better and to reflect with them on events we both saw happening there. This also created space to ask visitors who didn’t want to participate in formal interviews, to give their perspectives on the research approach and what was missing in my current approach.
Participatory methods and power imbalances
Walking interviews and co-analysis helped me to lessen certain power imbalances, that I felt were hindering the more classical interviews. Through the walking interviews, I quickly found out that participatory methods can show more nuanced pictures of homelessness. Respondents showed me places in Rotterdam that were important, safe, or worth avoiding at certain times for them. This was the first time where the meaning making of Pauluskerk became clear in the light of legal status. For example, as a Dutch visitor was able to show me around Rotterdam through his eyes, an undocumented man could not show much of the city. He didn’t go far away from the Pauluskerk, as he didn’t know the city well and felt it could be risky to stray too far. The risks involved being woken up more frequently by the police and possibly higher levels of stigmatisations by residents compared to the city centre. This insight led to new interviews with both men, which showed a very different experience of the Pauluskerk. For the undocumented man, it was a place of survival. He knew he couldn’t go back to his country of origin because of an ongoing war. Even though he wanted to return to his country of origin, waiting was his only option. That is why he spent most of his awake hours in the day shelter. He placed his received healthcare at the Pauluskerk in the context of ‘surviving until I can go back’. The Dutch man mostly came to the church to shower and eat. Sometimes he also participated in the cultural program. For him, the Pauluskerk was the only place he could go to without having to deal with government-institutions, where he often experienced stigmatisation. This also reduced the hours he spent in the Pauluskerk and influenced his perception of care and services.
Once, he also highlighted the risk of doing co-analysis with people that have bad experiences with institutions. While we were reading through a text transcript together, he pointed out, the sentences we both said weren’t always coherent or finished. As a researcher I was familiar with these types of texts. For the man at the other side of the table these texts reminded him of written reports in which he felt wrongly depicted by institutions. This led us to redefine the topics. He stated, that to fully understand his experience, you’ll have to understand how he was treated by institutions.
What does hard to reach mean?
Homelessness is often transient, with visitors of the Pauluskerk frequently disappearing for unknown reasons or, tragically, passing away. This year alone, at least four known visitors of the Pauluskerk died while living on the streets. Recently, a shocking example of an attack on a sleeping, homeless person was widely covered by the media. This resembles visitors’ stories of unsafety and violence while sleeping outside.
In academia, especially in social and health sciences, “hard-to-reach” groups are frequently discussed. Homeless people are often labelled as such. However, my experience taught me that the challenge lies not so much with the people themselves, but rather with the system that researchers represent. The word “researcher” can have very different meanings, depending on someone’s background. Research can remind certain visitors (who have experiences with government institutions) of institutions that ‘researched’ their trustworthiness. For others, it resembles experiences from countries that use ‘research’ mostly in the context of intelligence agencies. Despite people’s awareness of my role as a researcher, visitors talked with me. Sometimes, they were surprisingly open to share their stories and experiences, if they didn’t have to sign any privacy form. For researchers, such a form can be a form of safety. For others, it can be a source of danger. Stating that there’s no such thing as hard-to-reach would be an overstatement. Personal experiences with language barriers, or simply people not willing to talk to strangers also occurred frequently. However, this should be worth critical examination, as language barriers can be overcome by working more with researchers that speak third or fourth languages. .
This research is part of WijkWijs, a research collective aimed at redefining relations between researchers and people living in Rotterdam. Wijkwijs’ research practices aim to open up research to give space for a more equal, reciprocal research process, by for example, including experiential knowledge, and working closely with people whom it concerns.
