Intersecting Accounts of Marginalisation : Financial Troubles, Single-Motherhood and Ill Health Intersections in Institutional Interactions with the Swedish Social Insurance Agency

Abstract: Despite of a well-established welfare state in Sweden, socio-economic and residential segregation is increasing rapidly. This has for instance been related to the neo-liberalisation of the welfare state and housing system. One institutional tool for reducing systematic inequality is the housing allowance, which specifically targets low-income households with children as well as young households without children. However, recent studies show how these groups are becoming ever more excluded, despite of the financial aid. The aim of this thesis is thus to contribute with a situated understanding of the practical accomplishment of Swedish socio-economic marginalisation in relation to housing allowance and the welfare state. This is achieved by examining naturally occurring accounts socio-economic marginalisation in 366 audio recorded phone calls to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency about housing allowance, out of which I specifically focus on accounts made by single mothers. In order to make sense of the data, I apply and introduce an ethno-intersectional approach. This entails the synthesis of the applied ethnomethodological methods Conversation Analysis, Discursive Psychology and Membership Categorisation Analysis with intersectionality as one analytical device. The results demonstrate how single-mothers intersect financial troubles, single-motherhood and ill health while expressing situated marginalisation as part of doing legitimacy work. The study also sheds light on how the application of welfare policies could partake in the systematic (re)production of structural inequalities. At large, the introduction of the ethno-intersectional approach is grounded on the theoretical interest of encouraging further action-oriented and situated explorations of the ways in which categories of inequality such as class, ethnicity and gender operate in conjunction and contribute to the generation, reinforcement or alteration of structural intersections of socio-economic marginalisation and privilege.