Abstrakt
In this ethnographic study, I describe daily life at Home Z, an asylum for 100 residents. I explore the tensions between the inclusive orientation of social services and the system of the total institution.
Based on actor-network theory and on Goffman's model of the total institution, I develop a methodological tool of semi-permeable socio-material thresholds in order to investigate the question of residents' connectivity with people, things, and places beyond the authority of the institution. In so doing, as I aim for a deeper understanding of the formation of specific institutional spaces, I discover that Home Z's residents are living on an island that is kept continuously separated from the sea of wider society.