Once in use, the articulation of rooms and corners for withdrawing proved to be design strategies that worked quite well to better deploy the occupants' mundane choreographies. Several teens reported that a few weeks of being in the new living spaces had helped to ease tensions a lot, and most of the time, circulation remained lively. Sometimes, though, the staff noticed the reverse effect: the living spaces now also risked becoming too quiet,meaning there was not enoughmovement.But overall, these arrangements clearly allowed the familiarization of each person with others and the place through distance adjustments.

Distance adjustments differed from the repositioning of bodies towards others of 'spacing'. Instead, they were comprised of the very mundane circulation of one's footsteps, preferring to go here or there throughout the day. While the design strategies subtly encouraged such distance adjustments in the care practice, they contributed to each person's negotiation of presence within their surroundings, according to what was happening from one moment to another. In interviews, several teens stressed that the improvised paces of these distance adjustments were a key difference from disciplinary settings, mostly schools or psychiatric wards, where spaces and moments of circulation were clearly delineated. As one teen, Karina, emphasized, the conditions for circulation in the day center were flexible: instead of the long corridors of hospitals or schools where one must walk some distance to reach a spot, here you could switch from one room to another in the space of a moment.6 Caregivers, too, adjusted their distance through these

6 Karina's point could not have been more right. Corridors are key to the largescale institutions that have been established since the 19th century, including the asylums of moral treatment, where they distributed and classified individuals, and prevented spontaneous mingling among them (Luckhurst 2019: 157–210). In Goffman's 'total institution' (1961, cited in Luckhurst 2019), though, some of its hallways constitute 'refuges' for the inmates' 'underlives' that the professionals tolerate.

ordinary placements and displacements when they attempted to generate the 'right atmosphere'. Noise often guided their game of presence and absence, by inciting them to come cheer up a room that had fallen silent, or to straighten teens out if they overheard some boisterous activity.7 The mere unexpected distribution of attendants gave hints for adjustments, as Rachid, a nurse, put it:

Yesterday, for instance, I wanted to settle in the living room. But then I saw that some trainees were already there. Each was busy speaking with a youth. So I didn't go, because I didn't want to overload the presence.

To negotiate one's own degree of presence among others was part of the care work, for those providing and receiving it, while engaging them in a familiarizing process.8 As Baptiste explained in the story of the speaking group that opened this chapter, despite caregivers' precedence over teens in ordering the place, the former also wanted the living spaces to belong to the latter, thus letting them find their own familiar landmarks there. The articulation of rooms and corners for withdrawing that suggest distance adjustment, then, worked with that territorial ambiguity of the living spaces. These material arrangements drew teens and care-

7 Distance adjustments are often entwined with the calibration of the sound ambiance. Such adjustments are done thanks to a diffuse way of listening that I called "to lend an ear": when one let their attention be caught by surrounding noises or stillness. See d'Hoop (2020).

8 The suppleness with which a care receiver negotiates degrees of privacy is a pivotal dimension of many care situations. Twigg (1999) discusses the spatial ambiguity of privacy in care in the case of the provision of bathing in the people's own homes. There, caregivers manage this ambiguity by reordering (or not) boundaries between more private or public areas of the house. More broadly, it's worth noting that today's ordinary search for privacy in a house became the substratum of domestic architecture in the modern era in Europe. It was achieved thanks to spatial strategies, like limiting the number of doors in a room, or channelling circulation in passages like hallways and staircases. On the emergence of that sensibility together with its spatial configurations, see Evans (1997[1978]).

givers every day, or rather every moment, into mundane choreographies that blurred professional and personal ways of relating.

*Figure 8: Map of the sightlines in the old house.*

### **Hanging out**

With the relocation to the new building, sofas became the subject of an interesting failure story. They were such ordinary things in the daily practice that nobody noticed how crucial they were, until they went missing. A few days after moving into the new space, the sofas had not yet been delivered. This provoked a crisis that was quite unexpected: without them, the teenagers quickly dispersed throughout the building, or simply left the day center. Caregivers were soon exasperated because they had, in their words, "to run after teens" to find them. This devastated the subtle play of movement between them that was necessary for their relational practice. Searching for the teens turned the informal relationship into a disciplinary one. They needed stronger 'anchor points' that everyone could pass by and where they could likely find others, without even really settling down. When the sofas finally arrived, the situation recovered its balance. Obviously, they were central to sustaining the group's loose but necessary cohesion. The absence of the sofas jeopardized the casual togetherness made possible by hanging out near anchor points in the living spaces.

The sofa crisis led me to look back at observations that were progressively invading my field-note journal, though they sounded trivial when I first jotted them down.They depicted scenes where nothing seemed to be happening, but where everyone was relating to each other and to the surroundings in a rather loose way. Like, someone grabs a coffee, while someone else moves from one game to observing another. Others settle down in one place, then join a chat elsewhere. Or someone goes to the kitchen to ask about the preparation of the meal. Why did I record these seemingly insignificant anecdotes? Reading them again, it became trenchant that the familiarity enacted with these living spaces took shape, too, when the teens hung out or lay around without seeming involved in what we were doing.The living spaces provided affordances for personal ways of relating that weren't firmly structured as in planned activities. How did they do that?

Back to the sofas. They were not only anchor points for hanging out or settling down. They were also objects for resting the body. The sofas were made of fabric, and together with cushions and footstools they allowed the body to relax, whether sitting, lying down, or finding a way between both postures.9 The sofas were at angles or facing each other, as were the benches in the yard, or in the new building, a bar with stools in the kitchen that encouraged conversation among us. In a more improvisational way, leaning on your elbows on a working surface, on a low wall, or against a doorframe also allowed loose bodily positions during interactions. Our corporal engagements with these sitting and leaning elements set the tone of our chats, stories, thoughts, anecdotes, news, and jokes that we shared throughout the day. 'Hanging out' occurred through the relaxed bodily and speaking attitudes that most of us adopted in our

9 Sennett (1976) traces the advent of what was called, in the early 19th century, the 'comfortable': chairs, divans, and sofas, made of cushions for relaxing bodily postures between sitting and lying down (338–342). When mass manufacturing developed, these objects reached the wider public and invaded living rooms.

own way,in ourinteractions with sofas, benches, doorframes or countertops. Such informal interactions contradicted the more straightforward professional and educational relationships. Again, they contributed to blurring the differences between each person's role.

As I tried to understand how 'hanging out' worked, it was impossible not to notice a major aspect of the living spaces: the presence of the kitchen, with its specific layout and cook. Hanging out around the kitchen and the cook was a way of familiarizing that appeared especially welcome in regard to the danger of institutional routines. A typical day at the center was structured with breakfast,lunch, afternoon snacks,meetings, departures for activities, or returns from outings. I had been at the center for less than a week when I became aware of how much the repetition of those daily activities threatened the care work to become incredibly dull for everyone, a least, if each day unfolded identically to the one before it. But that wasn't the case at all. Take lunchtime. It was a significant gathering where all the teenagers ate with most of the caregivers. And it was scheduled at 12:30 each day. But we did not all arrive at the same time, serve, eat, nor clean up nor even leave together. We would hang around as the meal was being prepared as well as after we finishing eating. The dining room and kitchen became crowded at varying paces. As we bumped into each other when making our way through the space, seemingly casual proposals could be made, such as invitations to sit at a table, and dodges of these interactions as well. Towards the end, the group would progressively fade, with some staying to wash the dishes.

Hanging out in the kitchen before, during, and after lunch emerged as the most persistent hotspot. Over time, the kitchen and the cook remained a luring point that mediated indirect encounters between teens and caregivers. How was that accomplished? The transition to the new building emphasized the importance of the details of the kitchen's material layout. In the old townhouse, the kitchen was open on the dining room and the yard and provided sightlines to the living room and the entrance hall. Due to this central and open location, you could catch glimpses of the cook at work but also hear noise from the pans and smell the aroma of dishes being prepared. The kitchen held professional equipment and appliances made of stainless steel, which gave it a professional character. However, the domestic spatial layout invited the teenagers and caregivers to stop by countless times each day, to take leftover food from the fridge or put a coffee mug in the sink. In this way, the kitchen held an institutional ambiguity between professional and domestic site.

For the new building, the architects and caregivers insisted that the kitchen remain part of the group's circulation. However, the consensus was not so smooth. Josie, the cook, had precise requirements for practical details so the kitchen could meet her need for storage, cleaning, cutting, baking, as well as socializing, all in the same spot. As perhaps goes without saying, this was far from easy. Even if the kitchen was first and foremost Josie's workspace,it had become too crowded in the townhouse for her to prepare meals with the intense traffic that disturbed her workflow (figure 10). In other words, hanging out in the kitchen worked too well for her to cook without too much disturbance. She asked to close off the kitchen, but this was not an option to the team nor the architects, who wanted to maintain conditions of togetherness.The new kitchen arrangements ended in a compromise: the baking part was left open, but walking through it was not possible anymore. In this way, the kitchen became semi-open. The low wall delimiting the kitchen in the townhouse was rebuilt as a larger bar in the new building, inviting its occupants to sit down or to hang out in that area, away from the food preparation area (figure 9). In the new building, the kitchen's appeal was balanced with the help of the bar's material layout.

#### 78 The Slightest Attachment

*Figure 9: Birds-eye view of the living spaces in the new building, with a sofa in the corner and people hanging around the bar.*

*Figure 10: Birds-eye view of the kitchen in the house, with people hanging around the cook.*

Now, I puzzled over these spatial details, but I never saw the kitchen work quite as well when Josie was absent. The kitchen's spatial organization gave her a central position, which helped make it a central spot. A round lady with mellow movements, exact gestures, and a deep quiet voice, Josie's presence mediated our informal encounters with the kitchen.10 In interviews, the teens told me how often they went to see her, as did the caregivers. One of them shared that, "by speaking

10 In the field of medical sociology, Martin (2016) draws analogies between an open kitchen in a support center for cancer and the spaces of cafés: both working sites provide affordances for informal encounters, for sharing a place with strangers as much as more familiar others. Here, the open kitchen was so tightly connected with the person of the cook that strangeness had very few chances to survive among attendants.

#### 80 The Slightest Attachment

with her, we are in the group, with the teens who are often around the kitchen." Sometimes I also glimpsed more intimate interactions with Josie, like when one came whispering to her, or helped her refasten an earring as it loosened while she cooked. She was a caregiver, too, but of a different kind. She gave care without it being officially recognized as such. She never left 'her' kitchen, but she noticed who had eaten or not, or who had not had enough, and who had helped with the dishes. She whispered her observations to the caregivers but never addressed the teens concerned directly. Josie embraced the ambiguity of her position as a caregiver. The team invited her to attend their weekly meeting to share her views with them, but she refused. Only once, after settling in the new building, did she attend a more important meeting for aligning with the new organization. I heard her snoring after half an hour. She did not seem interested in more formal discussions about the teens, institutional matters, the care or therapy. Just as her semiopen kitchen, she remained an institutional ambiguity, a mediator of informal encounters. Without their ambiguous position in relation to their institutional purpose, the 'hanging out' social dynamic would most probably not have occurred as such. The open kitchen, the cook, and the movement around them formed a suggestion that stirred things up, scrambling daily routines. Together with spatial elements that permitted more relaxed bodily positions, the kitchen and the cook helped our familiar webs to unfold by hanging out without much overt involvement in activity.

#### **Material suggestions**

During the first few weeks of my fieldwork and when moving to the new building, clustering hotspots, contact adjustments and hanging out manifested as some of the ways in which familiarity was enacted in everyday care. In particular, those stories helped me better understand how the living spaces contributed to the forming of attachments. They demonstrated the suggestive importance of the material affordances of such spaces. By no means would their spatial arrangements invite clear

and straightforward (inter)personal accommodations. Of course, the living spaces proposed apparent functional uses, like sitting at a table to eat. But they also left room to maneuver as they suggested informal and (inter)personal accommodations, like hanging out in the kitchen. Instead of a strictly functional place that explicitly stated who did what and where, these living spaces afforded the teens and caregivers to familiarize thanks to material suggestions that were open-ended and ambiguous. Hotspots and their objects, such as games, benches, or the semi-open kitchen, attracted others to join without overt invitation, prompting participants to cluster or hang out. Hotspots incited them to engage in ambiguous play and to space their bodies to better deal with simmering tensions. The presence of many available objects supported the adjustment of contact when addressing another indirectly. The articulation of rooms did so too, whether by exchanging discreet glances through sharp sight lines, or by negotiating one's presence through distance adjustments. In these ways, the living spaces were suggestive since their invitations were open-ended with different possibilities. They left room for ambiguities insofar as everyone's engagement could be tailored to a way that better suited them in a present situation, when doing something, addressing someone, adopting a casual attitude, going somewhere, or being near someone else. This was how the living spaces fostered familiar bonds. Perhaps their 'institutional ambiguity', being both a domestic setting and a workplace, was best palpable in the case of the kitchen, its layout and its cook. They stirred up informal encounters while enticing us to hang out together. In sum, the living spaces, with their hotspots and available things, rooms articulations and corners for withdrawing, resting elements and central kitchen, provided affordances that worked as 'material suggestions'.

What I call material suggestions underlined a mode of moderate, soft attraction that characterized the affordances of those spatial arrangements. These affordances worked in a specific manner: they did not furnish straightforward propositions, but what could be done with them was quite open-ended. In other words, for the living spaces or its objects to invite users to experience informal contacts and attitudes, and to develop personal acquaintances, their affordances had to remain

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suggestive. A crucial dimension of the notion of affordance is that of perception: an environment affords someone's action when that person perceives some of its specific features. Thus, an affordance is ecological: neither a property of a physical surrounding, nor a subjective property, it points both ways, to the reciprocity at stake in the interaction between an organism and an environment (Gibson 1986: 129). In the context of the day center, this reciprocity worked through suggestions and possible responses to them. For instance, narrow sightlines incited discreet glances without imposing a gaze on the viewer, nor on the object of their attention. Such affordances of space remained unclear and suggestive because they induced actions – a cluster, a glimpse, a bodily positioning, a move to another spot, or a move towards a smell, etc. – without forcing those outcomes. I'm not saying that the living space's affordances were not or hardly perceptible. Their opacity was of a different kind from that of incomprehensible objects whose design gives no clues – or sometimes false clues – on how to use them, causing everyday frustrations (Norman 1998). Here, unclear affordances did not entail misunderstanding, but contingency: their open-ended and ambiguous character presented occasions for personal convenience, offering the possibility to attune to what happened in the moment. This way, the living spaces' suggestions allowed a youth's personality to form by diffusing itself in the surrounding, recalling Thévenot's words (2001: 77) about the 'attached personality' that takes shape with familiar usages.

In the context of a psychotherapeutic practice, the notion of material suggestions raises the problem of influence on the people one seeks to care for. Since material spaces suggest certain ways of doing, they influence mundane interactions with them and between teens and caregivers. The common understanding of 'suggestion' assumes a psychological process that brings an idea to the mind when someone or something gives hints or inklings, without plain or direct explanation. Suggestions in the waking state, psychology scientists acknowledge, are not especially verbal. An environment, an object, a gesture or a wink can be suggestive as well,in a deliberate manner or not.11 Due to its insinuative, tempting, seductive or prompting character, the practice of suggestion has acquired a bad reputation. It underwent a controversial history because it contradicts the ideal of freedom of the human subject, who is supposed to be autonomous and rational and equipped with free will.12

The material suggestions I identified with the living spaces did not presume that freedommeant autonomy without constraint.Rather, they brought attention to the contingency of their influence, and how it created different possibilities to act. Not only were these suggestions contingent upon their open-ended character,leaving ambiguity as to a teen's inclination to the possible uses of an arrangement, but such responses

Furthermore, the material suggestions that I observed in the day center are reminiscent of 'nudging' practices. By making small changes in an existing environment, a nudge gently pushes someone's decision-making. Nudging has raised a lot of ethical debates, specifically as whether it undermines or strengthens people's autonomy (Vugts et al. 2020). However, although here suggestions invite certain doings while remaining open to an array of possibilities, analysis through the lens of 'attachment' poses the problem differently. The concept presumes that individuals are not either free or alienated, but that they're caught in various reciprocal driving forces when entering in relation with other beings (human or not). These forces occur on the middle path of the 'faire-faire', that is, as much 'to make one do' as 'causing to be done'. Consequently, the moral and political problem is not to gauge whether an individual's autonomy is infringed or not, but rather to better distinguish good or bad attachments in the details of someone's relations. For this argument about the concept of attachment, see Latour (1999).

11 Studies on the effects of suggestion have spanned many fields, among others, placebo experiments, school learning and, more disconcerting, the justice system. See Michael, Garry & Kirsch (2012).

12 Suggestion sparked fierce debate during the time of Freud. He rejected hypnosis techniques and transformed their recourse to suggestion into 'transference'. This concept purified the patients' life experiences from its randomness, and brought it back into an inner symptom with which the analyst could work in ways Freud saw as controllable. According to him, assuming that suggestions have potency in the therapeutic relationship would have dismissed the idea that symptoms come from inside the patient and, in the same move, it would have failed to align with scientific legitimacy (Stengers 1992).

also impacted how caregivers would attune to them.When Rachid negotiated his degree of distance to the adolescents at a particular spot, in a particular moment, the influence was exerted through spatial mediation from patient to therapist, not only the other way around.When material suggestions work in such a contingent manner, they diffuse influence on others in countless ways, shattering the premise of a one-way vector targeted at someone. These discreet, ordinary and unruly forces allow one to disrupt the asymmetrical relationships inherent to care work. While teens were often tempted or drawninto ameandering flow of ambiguous suggestions, they could easily dodge them as well. They also influenced the team in how they responded, either with personal accommodation, or with resistance to it.

In my view, it was because material suggestions enabled such contingent influences that they were constitutive of the care work. Far from entailing a mere permissiveness or freedom, these suggestions enabled teens and caregivers to familiarize while better dealing with the discomfort of institutional pressure. Indeed, the close relationships that caregivers sought to incite were often not easy for the teens to engage with. Simply being in the day center already constituted an institutional pressure to participate in community life, activities, and more formal therapy (interviews, medication). The teens I met were highly sensitive to the ambiguity between being with others and being burdened by their expectations. They retreated when they felt one had tried to impose a certain behavior upon them, particularly teenagers who had already frequented many institutions. The atmosphere in the living space was highly volatile. It could pass from electric agitation to dead calm, and hence asked adjustment of teens who needed company or tranquility. In interviews, most of the teens evoked how much they did not feel the duties of "staying here" or "going there". While describing their typical day, the teens' words, at first unsettling, insisted on these contingencies: "I happen to [...]", "it depends on [...]", "either [I go here], or [there]", "if [someone is there/doing something], then I go towards [them]", etc.

This dependency on circumstance frames familiarity as a form of attachment that sprouts when someone tests what might please them in a given situation, in the moment. The person focuses less on themself,

on an object, or on a genre, but with this form of attachment it is the appropriate moment or situation that is pertinent (Hennion 2007: 110–111). In this sense, the material suggestions foster familiarity as a highly opportunistic attachment. I do not say that they remove the discomfort of institutional pressure, persistently at stake in the diffuse influences when caregivers and adolescents adjusted their attitudes. But had the spatial arrangements or the team imposed more formal interactions or assumed intentions, making teenagers feel a duty to socialize, the latter would hardly familiarize in such informal and contingent ways.They would hardly create these early personal attachments in the middle of everyday objects and casual attitudes. Consequently, caregivers' informal knowledge would also dissolve, since they would lose the possibility of progressively perceiving how each teenager responded to the suggestions of the living spaces, and to their contingent influence.

## **Chapter 3** Involvement in workshops

"There, we had a spatial problem." Marion, a caregiver, signaled to me at the end of the first month of fieldwork, calling my attention to workshop spaces in the old house. She went on:

OneWednesday a month, we have two workshops that should be done in *L'Annexe* [a room for creative activities] at the same time. Thus last time, we found ourselves doing a Creation workshop in the dining room. It was horrible! It was not good at all: the frame… the place's resonance… well, it was not framing.

I seized it: When you say, 'not framing', what is it exactly?

Marion: We didn't have the material we needed. So we brought some [from L'Annexe], but this limits the expression work we asked them [teens] to do. And for them it was not a place where we usually put ourselves in our bubble and work. This is a community place[*le communautaire*], where we usually eat our meals. We have access to glasses, to coffee, and so on, and not to the material we need to be at hand. And the resonance, and the light are not the same. There is something less calm, less cocooned, that helps less to put themselves in their bubble.

The living spaces were quite good at suggesting familiar bonds, but when it came to involving teens in focused activities, except maybe for a cooking workshop, these material spaces were certainly not models of an ideal configuration. On the contrary, here a Creation workshop was made hardly possible since the spaces did not provide the right materials available at hand. And their light and resonance prevented participants from applying themselves to what they were supposed to do. So certain conditions were needed to frame the activity in ways that enabled teenagers to 'put themselves in their bubble', to get involved in doing it. Marion's words hint at a form of attachment occurring in everyday activities, when the adolescents were caught up in a sort of connection to what they did. Her words also indicate that the possibility to create such a bubble was linked to certain conditions, among which the space played a key role in switching participants to another state. The spatial problem that Marion raised opens a path for turning to the material spaces for activities, and for tackling these questions: How does teenagers' involvement take shape, with its successes and failures, during the care work? And how do the material spaces of activities provide conditions for these involvements?

In this chapter I probe how teens' affinities took shape in workshops in relation to their spatial settings. I first portray what an 'involvement' in practice is and the role it plays for the care work. I then turn to several issues that add more layers to the picture: the 'framing' of activities, the uncertain character of such attachments, the adjustments they require when facing school tasks, their call to bodily senses, and teens' disinvolvement from a planned activity. This ensemble of stories led me to see that workshop spaces together with caregivers' techniques facilitated teenagers' passage from indifference to greater involvement into what they were proposed to do. These transitions could succeed or fail, especially since teensinvolvement was uncertain and unstable.However faint and ephemeral, teens' passage to and from their involvement in workshops were key daily events to the team, who could then work with each teen's personal traits, difficulties and possibilities.

#### **Relating 'involvement'**

To begin with, where, when, and how did I discern the 'involvement' of teens in activities in the care work?The team proposed a repertoire of activities that might be of interest to the teens. When newcomers arrived in the center, they were offered to choose what activity they wanted to do on a weekly timetable (table 1). They then scheduled their choice for a two-week trial period. Presenting the timetable to them was a way to ask: what do you like? Its repertoire was designed to appeal to tastes adolescents would most likely have already developed. Not surprisingly, sports or video games were largely triumphant over knitting.The teens went to their activities each morning and afternoon. In every morning meeting, the team reported on the happenings in the previous day's workshops. Often these observations had already been partially shared at informal moments, as caregivers interacted in their shared office space.

*Table 1: Timetable of a weekly program.*

But I soon realized, caregivers used a plethora of verbs to tell of the teens' responses when they reported stories about recent workshop sessions. The teens "got/were involved", "engaged themselves", "participated", "invested themselves", etc. It was a bit perplexing for me to figure out, after hearing all these terms, how I would follow a single conceptual line. This became even more disquieting when I discussed the matter with Ingrid, a caregiver who wondered how each of these terms, once translated from their common use into an ethnographic text, would be burdened with connotations. An 'engagement' would point to a long-term commitment, with the requirement of making a pledge, and less to being caught up in an ongoing situation. Although teens who attended a session were called 'participants', the word 'participation' puts too strong an emphasis on their input when taking an active part. And 'to invest oneself ' conjures the psychoanalytic tradition. There, it supposes an analogy between psychic operations and nervous functioning, to detect how patients invest their energetic discharges towards an object or a representation. The term 'investment' assumes that forces only come from people, whereas I'm interested in the conditions distributed within material and social environments. They, too, exert forces and reveal weaknesses. So Ingrid and I came to agree that the term 'involvement' was the best candidate for reporting the states that caregivers sought to induce in practice, and that I could describe as an ethnographer.

Indeed, such involvement was less a normative prerequisite to which teens should be able to answer, as if it relied solely on them, or as if their lack of involvement would incur the team's disapproval of their reason for being in the center.1 The teens' involvement was everything but an individual duty. Instead it required attempts from the team to enfold them in an ongoing activity, with a diffuse power at stake when trying to lure them. In practice, the caregivers noticed how the adolescents paid attention during an activity, the things they came to use,

1 This tension is crucial among therapeutic and social workers who resist the (implicit or explicit) injunction that care receivers must involve themselves personally in order to receive support (Rafanell i Orra 2011: 159).

the gestures they made, when they expressed pleasure, emerging ideas, hesitations, or aversions, or had exchanges with other participants. The term 'involvement' (in French, *'implication'*) depicts these various ways of engaging oneself in interactions with things and others. To me, it resonates with Goffman's work. His examination of 'involvement' targets the perceivable, verbal or non-verbal responses of a participant who, in practice, "gives, or withdraws from giving, his concerted attention to some activity at hand […]", implying "a certain closeness between the individual and the object of involvement, a certain overt engrossment on the part of the one who is involved" (Goffman 1963: 43).2 This notion, then, helps to convey those back and forth movements in interaction and attitude that showed how participants became more or less captivated by an activity, swept away indifference or returned to it, came to dedicate themselves within workshops, retreated to the margins of disinvolvement, or turned towards other involvements outside of the main activity – but without assuming that these responses came from individual teenagers. In the day center, to induce and enhance these movements, gestures, attention, concentration, or concerns of the adolescents was a daily challenge for the team.

But how exactly did teens'involvements play a role in their care work? I kept being struck by themannerin which the caregivers reported every-

2 The notion of 'involvement' reaches much further throughout Goffman's work. The sociologist first draws the contours of the concept in his doctoral thesis in 1955. He casts it as a "subtle mixture of spontaneity and calculation" needed to make an interaction succeed (Winkin (2016 [1988]): 93, my translation). In *Behavior in Public Places* (1963), Goffman underlines the normative character of the non-verbal communication and gestures used in reacting to an encounter (35). After discussing the bodily aspect of involvement, the author adds more layers to the concept: "To be engaged in an occasioned activity means to sustain some kind of cognitive and affective engrossment in it, some mobilization of one's psychobiological resources: in short, it means to be *involved* in it." (Ibid: 36, original emphasis). Goffman insists that involvement always occurs within a situation, where normativity is at stake in a group that use its own idioms of involvement. In this way, he conceptualizes a 'self' that is situational, crafted through involvements in interactions.

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day stories about workshops. Their tones and gestures evoked the moments they had experienced, making the rest of the team feel as though it was happening on the spot. As with familiar bonds, the teens' involvement in activities was noticeable in very small responses and discreet interactions. Let's listen to Etienne who, during a morning team meeting, talked about a workshop he had led in the studio of a small radio station:

There, the space is divided in two rooms: the technical room and the one with the microphones. […] One room is where we play the recordings and the other one for the live broadcast, where we [caregivers and teenagers] sometimes improvise. A small red light switches on and – Hop! It's our turn to speak! We go on air! So obviously, it is not always easy. … Karl and Dorian were in the technical room, so they played things with a big console. … Well, they were well caught up in that play, with the technical and computing things. Karl did it with this very serious position, about the technical features, a bit like in the cooking workshop, when he takes very seriously his responsibility, very assertive. He is good in that role. On the contrary, he will never come to speak into the microphones. There is no way for him. It is like in the cooking workshop, he won't go to speak to the cashier at the grocery.

Not only did caregivers report on a teen's involvement, but they also compared it between different activities, or between different parts of an activity with its respective material and technical settings. Etienne was struck by Karl's assertive involvement in technical tasks when he captained the radio console, and by his avoidance of spontaneous ones when he wouldn't dare speak in a live broadcast. Noticing this was supported by previous observations in the cooking workshop, where part of the setting, dedicated to the preparation of dinner, entailed technical tasks in the kitchen and another, like speaking to the cashier, required spontaneity in front of others. Workshops were diverse and each happened in specific settings, inside and outside the center. Teenagers responded to distinct settings in their own way. According to what they were more inclined to do, they would easily enter one state while dodging others. Caregivers noticed how it went and learned to know each youth when

recognizing similar involvements and aversions, and they shared these clues with the team.

Thus, caregivers related teens' involvement in the double senses of 'relating': while giving an account of what they had noticed, they also connected it to other observations or information that was within their reach. In doing so, caregivers tried to better see what the youth's logic and sensibilities were, and the accompanying forces and difficulties. The team did not seek the strong commitment of an adolescent in a particular workshop. Instead they compared the various ways that teens got involved with and disengaged from different situations at hand. Other caregivers also related stories, as they recognized these same clues or contested them – sometimes relating as well to occurrences that happened during informal time in the living spaces. In this manner, they built, expanded, and reinforced their informal knowledge of each teenager. Whoever attended team meetings or hung around in their office was quickly aware of that informal knowledge, and was often drawn to help build it.

It was slowly becoming clear tome that caregivers'acquaintance with each youth enabled them to notice unpredictable changes among them. Workshops were diverse and put to the test the particular inclinations and aversions of each adolescent. On an everyday basis, caregivers narrated how workshops ran into snags due to personal, often emotional and relational difficulties, such as conflicts, distresses, fatigue, refusals, and so on. But they could also be pleasantly surprised by incremental changes in youth involvement. I heard in a team meeting how Karina, who always showed a will to perform tasks perfectly, started to relax, let go, ask more questions, say things more fluidly. "It starts", a caregiver recounted: "We feel something is becoming different in workshops." Her colleagues recognized that Karina had changed in the manner she got involved. This change became a common concern that spread across the staff, all agreeing that they were better off supporting her in furthering a more relaxed involvement. I also heard about teens usually boiling over when in a group, who became more able to hold themselves back from messing things up. Caregivers commonly mentioned bodily movements or contacts in those changes. They mentioned how Nadia, a rather stiff,

inhibited youth, came to respond with laugh and smile in dance or massage workshops, or how one day girls "completely unleashed themselves" in games that demanded moving around and jumping. Caregivers also noted changes in verbal involvement, as when participants "take their places" in bringing their knowledge of a topic to the rest of the group. It seems from all this that, day after day, meeting after meeting, alongside the familiarity each adolescent wove in the center, their involvement in workshops was a vital constituent of the sociotherapeutic work. In the ongoing practice, teens' responses in activities did not merely provide the team with informal knowledge, but also reshaped it, with surprising changes that called for adjusting the care work with them.

#### **Framing uncertain attachments**

Now, when caregivers spoke about teens' involvement, their focus went beyond the persons. Their discussion touched, too, to the "frame" that Marion evoked about the Creation Workshop: the material setting that could encourage or hinder it. What does it mean, in practice, to frame participants' involvement in an activity? This question brings our attention back to the spatial conditions of workshops and leads us to discern more nuances about that form of attachment.

Workshops, as diverse as they were, worked much better – and sometimes could only work – with precise arrangements that fitted the type of activity. The move to the new building brought these requirements into sharper relief. It offered caregivers the occasion to arrange certain rooms with greater specificity. One such rearrangement occurred with a room on the first floor in the old townhouse. Due to lack of space, it served as a multipurpose room and was arranged with minimal and flexible objects, like foldable chairs, tables with wheels, a closed storage unit, a movable TV screen, and computers at the back of the room. Two of the activities that happened in this room were named *Cidébat* (in French, a mix of '*cinéma*' and '*débat*') and Writing Play. Both required caregivers to quickly arrange the room to create different settings: chairs randomly facing the screen for the first, and a big central

table where everybody could sit without being too close for the second. After having moved to the big new building, however, keeping both workshops in a single multipurpose room proved absurd after just a few sessions. Ingrid, the caregiver in charge of both activities, recounted to me how they tried to move the writing workshop from a small room in the middle of the ground floor corridor to another one, located upstairs, whose "atmosphere was more suitable …. brighter… [with] views on the garden and on tree [… and for] a youth who sometimes wants to sit alone for writing, a table at the back."This room, with its light, views, and possibilities for distance adjustments, better matched ideal conditions for writing. The activity's displacement from one room to another allowed the downstairs room to be dedicated to workshops meant to direct the teens' collective attention towards a screen, like Cidébat or video games. There, Ingrid explained, the teens' involvement was greatly improved after adding some lounge chairs, a blind for the light, a few movie and game posters, and DVDs on the shelves.

When I asked her how precisely those changes of material setting affected the running of workshops, Ingrid was quick to answer, "Then we really could 'make a group' with teens!" She underlined how these conditions for the group were inescapably entwined with specific forms of concentration. I had to attend the activities to understand what this was all about. Next Tuesday, we started the Writing Play session by sitting around the central table with Sabine, an external artist, who gave us some constraints for playing with our writing. We spread to different tables, some participants withdrawing further in corners. We spent around half an hour focusing on our own pages, every now and then letting our attention drift to the sky and the foliage beyond the windowpanes. You could have heard a fly buzz while we were concentrating on our words. We then gathered back at the main table, read our pieces aloud, and shared comments on the choices of words, rhythm, metaphors, or about a wider scope of unexpected issues raised by the texts' content. Passing through to this second moment implied a switch, as each of us departed from our paper and went back to the group.

Doing the Cidébat also implied a switch in attention, but it did so quite otherwise. The small room downstairs was far less open to a range

of suggestions. Here, walls surrounded us as we randomly placed our chairs in front of the screen. Bodies were much closer. The twilight enhanced this closeness, as well as our attention towards the movie. During the screening, Ingrid sometimes paused it and turned the light on,in the aim of launching short debates on what was going on in certain scenes. The switch between focus on the film and exchanges within the group provided occasions to encourage teenagers' reflexivity, not only about the object of appreciation but about broader issues as well.

The two rooms, each in their specific manner, framed distinctive forms of participant concentration. These differences brought into relief, too, two different ways to switch their attention from a greater absorption in the movie, towards group exchanges and relations with the other participants. The passage between these different states was at the core of teenagers' involvement.

But it must be said that framing the right conditions for participants' involvement in an activity did not always rely so heavily on the specific features of a material setting. Gaël, a caregiver, specified to me that going outside remained crucial to the care practice, for it relied on "the infrastructures available in everyday life", such as public transport, places or facilities that everyone used. Often, though, going outside led to more messiness. One of the most open-ended activities in terms of spatial organization was called "Introduce me to your city". It could happen anywhere in Brussels, but not in just any way. It relied on a basic framework: for each session, a youth chose a place in Brussels that mattered to him or her, and guided the others there. The teen received a camera to use during the outing, and some of the pictures would later be displayed in the center. So the setting encompassed no less than Brussels, its public transport, its meeting spots, public infrastructure for walking or resting, a camera, and occasionally a map. And its framework relied on the teenagers' previous attachments to a place, the group's preparation for the outing, and the guiding youth. I joined some of these trips, and heard plenty of accounts upon the return of others. These made clear that, even though the framework sounded easy, often its actual happening was not. It sometimes became embroiled, for instance, when a young guide was confused about which

way to go, or when other participants resisted or even utterly refused to visit certain areas. Despite these disruptions, caregivers related many fruitful sessions of that workshop since it often produced moments where meeting one another was possible in ways that were not with ateliers constricted to a place. Since traveling and walk was the main activity, other contacts could be established and things said that were possible only thanks to this situation of being in motion in changing surroundings.3 In this workshop participants weren't captivated by an object, but rather drawn into place exploration, and this sowed easier chats along the way. This experience relied far less on accurate spatial conditions, and more on a thin practical framework that left a margin for unexpected events.

What becomes confusing, here, is that the porous aspect of these conditions in outside places makes you wonder whether teens' involvement, after all, could happen anywhere, whatever the material environment providing a frame for it. As the stories above witness, the importance of spatial organization depends of course on the specific kind of involvement caregivers seek to create. But the question of the 'anywhere' of activities limited caregivers' framing work. The threshold of minimal conditions for an activity to be considered therapeutic work remained under debate among them. Going to the cinema was one of the outside activities that heated that debate because, some caregivers argued, it could be merely 'occupational'. This meant that such a minimal frame would lead to simply pass time with teens, probably giving some rest to the activity leaders. But going to the cinema, other caregivers asserted, substantially contributed to the sociotherapeutic work insofar as they chose movies with teens about topics of their concern, organized the outing with them, and opened discussions about them. In short, they

3 The meditative experience of walking has spilled the ink of a fair number of writers and philosophers, although most often when practiced in solitude. Ingold and Vergunst's (2008) collection of ethnographies explores walking as a social activity, but I haven't found in it an account that addresses how walking with others would ease a chat, compared to more formal face-to-face interactions.

went to the cinema in a way that further solicited the teenagers' personal involvement and reflexivity. Caregivers' framing then built upon existing activities with material settings, such as a trailer, walking trajectory, ticket desk, screening room with its bleachers, or a nearby café. Framing the activity with this setting intensified a little bit what most of us do when going to see a movie.Their minimal framing took advantage of a mundane activity and amplified these activities to foster reflexive mindsets. By doing so, they turned that activity into therapeutic work.4

You won't be surprised, will you, to learn that the adolescents could resist and renegotiate a frame well. A noteworthy incident of this kind occurred during the Cidébat workshop. In the small dark room, remember, Ingrid interrupted the screening and turned the light on to switch the attention from the film to group exchange. But at some point of the session, Jimmy started to complain about these switches. He wanted to "be in the movie like as usual", he pleaded, meaning without being interrupted by pauses. Although in this workshop the movie served as an occasion for debate, to be engrossed by the plot was also necessary for his involvement, to enjoy the screening and simultaneously to make up his mind about it. Jimmy's complaint prompted all participants to revise the frame. After discussion, they decided to keep the pauses for debate after longer screening moments, long enough to be able to 'enter' into the movie again. So the framing of activity did not only help one put oneself in a bubble,asMarion pointed out. It was also about setting up the conditions to amplify any activity most of us do from time to time, like going to the movies or watching a film at home, in ways that better triggered participants' reflexivity. This reflexivity, as Jimmy reminded us, could also pertain to the frame of the activity itself.

4 To some caregivers, a minimal frame turns the activities and their objects into 'therapeutic mediations'. This means they foster a subjective appropriation of the medium by the patient. I don't share this understanding, first because such mediations through objects seem to target patients' symbolic speech, and I observed plenty of practical interactions that came to be relevant for care as well. Second, I base my analysis on the notion of attachment that carries a different, more social and material idea of 'mediation' (Hennion 2015 [1993]); but see the note about it in the introduction).

Looking back at these articulations about the 'framing' of activities – from the switches in participants' attention with the specific arrangements ofWriting Play and Cidébat, to theminimal conditions of outings, and the reflexivity all these framings were designed to trigger – teens' involvement now appears as a highly uncertain form of attachment. Indeed, I recognize in these framings the words of Hennion, Gomart and Maisonneuve (2000: 181). While regarding taste as an accomplishment in a practice in which attachments develop, they emphasize how amateurs create the right conditions to warm up a situation, and better feel if they like an object or not. Such a creation of conditions could involve the setting of a concert hall, but so would the gestures of a wine connoisseur handling their glass and smelling it before drinking. In any case, it is important to note that these meticulous assessments occur on a middle path: it is about actively making an affinity emerge, and being passively caught in it. In other words, when an attachment takes shape, it is an event that occurs *between* the taster and the thing, without locating the action in either one of them. Tasters may notice more refined differences, which intensify their feelings and perceptions, while the object deploys its qualities to them. Hennion says that these events happen in a reflexive mode (in French, '*cela se passe'*) that concerns the taster ("well, this music/wine is not so bad…") as much as the object that is able to respond, interrupt, or surprise them (Hennion 2009: 63). And it is because amateurs' appreciation occurs on such a middle path that they remain uncertain during reflexive moments.

Similarly, in the day center, the framing of activities offered conditions for participants'involvement in ways that their appreciations could be tested, especially since it encouraged reflexivity. Although material spaces provide conditions for possible involvement, it happens without guarantee, because the action doesn't come from a person or a thing, instead tracing a middle path between them. Of course, beyond the material and practical frame with which participants engage in the moment, many other mediators cultivate one's appreciation before and during an activity. In Hennion's theory of attachment, too, the creation of conditions does not only belong to the isolated moment of tasting, to the interactions between tasters and things, but it also relies on an extended flow of attachments (to previous experiences; to a body having been trained over time; to collectives, their judgments, and controversies; to other objects and places, etc.). This was clear as well in the case of the workshop "Introduce me to your city". Its framework was largely dependent on the teenagers' previous attachments to a place. So the team also considered the appreciations, and sometimes the passions, that teenagers had already developed before arriving. Nevertheless, what caregivers mostly did was to frame teens' possible involvement in the moment, on the uncertain pathways towards accomplishing an activity.They experienced it together with them on the spot and related it to their colleagues thereafter.

#### **This is not a classroom**

Knowing these uncertain paths, it turned out that workshops in the care practice did not aim at achieving impressive performances.The day center was a transitional place where the caregivers aimed at helping the teenagers regain stability in their lives. For most of them, this meant going back to school or engaging in professional projects. This was not a ready-made path. On the contrary, most of the teens had gone to many different schools and repeated years several times. All of them had dropped out of school for a while. A small group of caregivers, along with some teachers and artists, set up *La Porte Bleue*, a pedagogical workshop that attempted to reinitiate the learning of skills. Most of these were academic skills, which the adolescents anticipated negatively. For that specific workshop, the team mingled psychotherapeutic and pedagogic practices in order to try to reinvigorate teens' interest and rebuild their self-confidence, before tackling cognitive skills. Retrieving pleasure in learning was central for enabling the teens to dare to try it. Next to schoolwork, the team offered projects based on the production of artifacts of all kinds. This way, they hoped to pique the adolescents' interest and to drive their willingness to acquire new knowledge.

Teens' involvement in sessions at La Porte Bleue were thus granted a special status, for they might extend great promise but also deep disappointments. Kevin's story remains a striking one. He was only twelve, but had already spent years living in residential institutions for teens, or on the streets – where he happened to return some nights. Most of the time, he was unable to sit still. Yet for several months, his involvement in certain workshops suggested that he could find a sustainable project. As his interest in these activities solidified, he nearly did. One of the things he liked to do was to make models. So the team of La Porte Bleue started with that. Then model making became a vehicle for learning school subjects such as mathematics and history. During a staff meeting, Maud, the caregiver in charge of this workshop, related that it had worked quite well, but that it was not sufficient:

When he works on the model, I just give him a bit admiring attention, but without intervention. Then he's in his bubble and he can slow down. Because, he always wants to hurry. … But then we should not only offer him these bubbles. Which work to do with him now, for a long-term perspective?

The team reviewed several possible institutions and schools and concluded that an internship would be a better track for him. Maud found a place that would have been great: a center for rehabilitating birds located two houses from the day center. Kevin was delighted by this idea. He loved having contact with animals. Other caregivers had noticed him becoming quieter, watchful, and responsive when caring for horses. And the director of the bird rehabilitation center had agreed on the internship. And then, quite suddenly, Kevin disappeared. He somehow returned to street life for longer. For more than a month he didn't come back to the center, nor did he return to his residential institution. Caregivers were worried about the risks he ran in his homeless lifestyle.They sometimes met him in the neighborhood, where he came to give some news. But after having been reported to the police as a runaway for more than three weeks, Kevin wasn't legally allowed to continue his stay in the center or to start the internship. The term 'disenchanted' does not begin to describe how caregivers felt about this acute disappointment. They were daunted. Even though Kevin's involvement with models and animals opened a track for him, other forces made him drop out of it.

His story leaves little doubt about the vulnerable aspect of teens' involvement in the pedagogical workshop, which creates possible life projects for them. The care work was to keep trying to create a path without any guarantee of success. This was also the case for most of the other teenagers I eventually saw going back to school or to an internship. Those paths never appeared without pitfalls.

The space of La Porte Bleue thus was to enable teaching, training and raising interest among participants while dealing with the fragile aspects of resuming schoolwork and setting up a long-term project. In doing so, it could not in any way be designed as a standard classroom. Rather, it was a protected space, set a bit apart from the group's daily movements. No one could come there when sessions were occurring. No trainee, no ethnographer. It was only after having heard about that mysterious place for months that I went there with Maud, who gave me a guided tour.We walked to another large townhouse, two streets from the old building. She took me up to two rooms on the first floor, whose windows gave a view on gardens, yet without exposing the viewer to gazes from outside.While Maud told me how sessions happened there, I identified different ways in which the spaces provided conditions for trying to involve teens in learning, while tending to their apprehensions.

A first way related to the awakening of curiosity. Lots of objects were displayed all over both rooms.  All these things witnessed what had been made, or what was in the middle of being achieved. They were disposed with that sort of inevitable slight messiness that belongs to artworks in process. Though one room was devoted to schoolwork and the other to artistic activities, both looked more like art studios. They gave few clues about learning spaces, such as a blackboard painted on a wall, or a world map. The displayed objects were not left there because of a lack of storage space elsewhere. They played a role in practice, as Maud told me, especially when a youth discovered them:

I always do a first interview with a new youth in these rooms, because I want them to see it, to feel it. Even if it's messy, at least something would speak to them. It is a good indication when one says: 'hey, what's that?' And when nothing special catches their attention, you think: 'ouch, it is still complicated'. But where I'm sure to draw attention, it's when we pass to the artistic activities room. I show them the three paintings placed under glass [figure 11]. These surely interest them, without doubt, because they are beautiful, they're well done. And because it's something within their reach: a drawing, it is easier to do than study electricity, algebra or French. … There, you can feel how you will start to work with a youth, by being attentive to the way they take up the space: what do they look at, what are they are going to touch.

Maud described a technique that I understood as a 'curiosity trial'. The exhibition of these objects was not explicit. They were subtly left here and there within the mess. Their valorization was moderated, without greatmeans,without glorification.These objects didn't seem to bemeant for display. They were however beautiful and well done, or at least they could 'speak to' teenagers. To an anthropologist's ears, Maud's description of what these artworks did recalls Gell's theory about the agency of art (1998). To him, it is the technical virtuosity of the object that triggers a personal relationship with its observer, who in turn may be fascinated by it and in this way enter into relation with the artist.The beautiful and well-done objects displayed in the workshop room held potential for such fascination in its light form.They might seduce observers by arousing their curiosity, by intriguing them with a light surplus of wonder. They might even make them want to touch. Maud noticed these initial clues of a teenager's budding affinities, and she oriented her work thanks to them. The diversity of scattered objects increased the chances for these connections. And those 'well achieved' but still attainable items were better candidates for curiosity trials. I saw in these trials a singular technique which attempted to arouse curiosity through specific arrangements of objects and engagements with them. These material dispositions amplified their capacity to intrigue.

#### 104 The Slightest Attachment

*Figure 11: The three paintings: two in the corner and one above the fireplace.*

The curiosity trials carved a middle path in a specific manner. They incorporated modest valorization of artworks and other objects; the acts of pointing to them; sparks of attention from a teenager; and the caregiver's refined abilities to notice the advent of a participant's involvement at the slightest degree. In the case of clowning in dementia care, Hendricks calls this ability to notice the emergence of someone else's curiosity thanks to material things and bodily attitudes the "tackling of indifference" (2012: 459). As I recognized in Maud's technique, this ability was enabled through refined capacities "to distinguish with increasing subtlety between differences in how the other person relates to the world, attentively, physically, and sensorily" (ibid: 469).

Next, Maud told me about a second way to support teens' involvement in the session, by "walking the path". Since La Porte Bleue was set apart from the center, its team went to pick up the teens in the living room.They then walked for five minutes to the other building with them. "This walk is essential", insisted Maud, "because it allows us to feel the dynamic, what's going on, who has difficulty, who is overloaded, and, maybe, why". With this feeling of that momentary dynamic, she could adjust the start of the session, as she described when pointing to a sentence on a blackboard: "For instance, when I wrote this note 'What do we do with all we have in our heads?', it was because I felt on the path that the teens were parasitized with 30.000 questions". Adjusting the session would then equate to finding a better way of involving the teens using their dynamic at that moment. But when moving to the new building, La Porte Bleue was relocated inside it, on the first floor. The team often spoke about the loss of this possibility to "walk the path together". Even though it was a much shorter route, the teachers and caregivers kept coming to join teenagers in the living room. Sometimes they sat on the sofas for a quick chat together before going upstairs. This moment for feeling out the dynamic before entering the proper space of the workshop remained important for adjusting the mood at the start of the session.

Then, once in the rooms, their arrangement should allow one to avoid confrontation within proximity. When everybody came in, Maud told me, they would all come sit around a big central table, with pieces of paper and colored markers available on it. While sitting together, adults included, each participant wrote or drew a 'mood note'. "This is done very quickly", specified Maud, "but it gives an attitude to arriving teens… That we wouldn't be around the table, in a face-to-face confrontation, with nothing to do". From these first moments onwards, the material spaces mattered for organizing each person's presence within the group, thanks to the same layout in both rooms. They presented chairs around a central table, and one or two smaller tables in corners, again, suggested to adjust one's comfortable distance (figure 12). After having gathered around the central table, participants split in one or two rooms depending on whether they were working on schoolwork or a creative project. The rooms were not big. Many displayed objects or storage cabinets closely surrounding the tables. Maud underlined how much, "the space was used everywhere", meaning that it was better to avoid vast open spaces. Proximity safeguarded caregivers against

addressing the adolescents in a confrontational way, Maud detailed, just as did their bodily placement towards them: "We should not be too intrusive, so I avoid the face-to-face position. … I try to position us sideby-side, but not too close either. I place myself a bit angled, like this". In a swift move, she stepped her chair back from mine and turned it a bit aslant (figure 13). "Sometimes, we should come nearer because we put our attention on the mediating object, not on the person. But still, the gaze should not be too threatening".

Gathering to write quick notes before spreading, or spacing ones' body aslant within proximity; these two tricks worked with a spatial organization of presences. This spatial organization enabled participants to elude the face-to-face confrontations that risked hindering their involvement in a learning task.This organization manifested a strong contrast with the layout of traditional classrooms,where each person sits behind a single table, facing the board and teacher at a relative distance. It became plain, with the move to the new building, that this contrast was in no way modifiable. While the architects had first designed La Porte Bleue as a small classroom with an annex, caregivers made clear that this setting was not an option at all. So the two adjacent rooms went back to being conceived as small workshop spaces, with storage furniture, central tables, and others in corners (figures 14a-b).

*Figure 12: Map of La Porte Bleue before the move, in the separate house.*

*Figure 13: The caregiver's body placement in proximity, avoiding a confrontational position.*

*Figure 14a: Architects' plan of La Porte Bleue (14/10/13), firstly designed as a small classroom. Courtesy of Pierre Lenders & Antoinette Defay.*

*Figure 14b: Architects' plan as built (09/04/14), now designed as two workshop rooms with storage furniture. Courtesy of Pierre Lenders & Antoinette Defay.*

A last spatial trait that I denoted in Maud's account was her singular usage of the two rooms. In both the former house and the new building, artistic activities were separated from individual schoolwork in an adjacent room. Maud "juggled" with both rooms, she said abruptly. Before I could interrupt her with a question, she went on:

That's an extremely important hook, the plastic art, for all the young people who are in need of learning, because we can juggle. For example, when schoolwork turns difficult, one can take a break and go there to make a small basket. We use plastic art because it is so rewarding to make and finalize projects. … Here [in the schoolwork room], it doesn't work anymore?! Ok, let's go next door! The art workshop brings a slight diversion of things and it supports [participants]. It helps to return to the project with a crooked path, with self-satisfaction, with a finished product that one is proud of and comes to show back here. Because, at the end of each session, we all return to the central table [to tell what they've done].

I interjected: And how do you that, juggling?

She replied: Well, I avoid any reaction like 'ah no, that's not good any longer!' And sometimes you want to do it, to say 'Hey, come on, that's enough!' But I try not to let it get until that point of tension. So I'm very quick to pay attention to what's not working well … We should stay in a serene environment as most as possible for that. It doesn't mean that we erase all the problems, but that we're going to be as close as possible to what's actually happening… So that things don't come to damage youth's relationship to learning as well as our goals.

Juggling the rooms required an acute attentiveness for noticing very quickly when a blockage occurred with a youth. It required reacting before the school difficulty bogged them down, and before tensions needed to be addressed in an educational way. Teenagers' involvement in their learning activity was sustained with this particular adjustment of quick noticing within a close space and juggling different rooms, with different purposes.

Along the interview with Maud I better perceived how the spaces, together with caregivers' use of them, facilitated teens' involvement. They displayed objects in an attempt to raise curiosity. They walked paths together to better feel a momentary dynamic. Caregivers also spaced their body within proximate interactions. Or they juggled with rooms as soon as a blockage peeped out. Caregivers' adjustments thanks to these spatial arrangements were core to further enabling the teens' involvement in learning tasks. Importantly, the team of La Porte Bleue insisted, these adjustments would hardly be possible with the setting of a school and its classrooms. Classrooms are traditionally embedded with the themes of order and discipline (Markus 1993: 41–94).The details of their equipment are designed for framing the conditions in which pupils are supposed to learn. When allocated to their seats in rows, pupils' bodies are static. Their gazes are turned towards a raised platform, from which the teacher addresses all of them simultaneously.This strongly framed setting keeps out, in recreation areas and corridors, possibilities to venture into unexpected encounters among many different movements. The spaces of the pedagogical workshop diverged from that traditional, but still very common setting of the classroom.This was due to the slight messiness of things, the path to be walked together in random motions, the organization of presences, non-confrontational ways of addressing, and the adjacent creative room. I'm not saying that such crammed and more loosely structured rooms were better than classrooms in general. But their contrasts, and maybe also other ones, were essential for aiding unsettled teenagers to get involved again in learning.Mingling pedagogic and care practices requires such an alternative frame and the tactful adjustments it enables.

#### **Sensing a specific world**

Except for the pedagogic workshop,activities existed neither for the purpose of learning skills, nor were teenagers supposed to continue these activities after their stay. They were not expected to become experts in making mosaics or writing poetry. It was their involvement in the moment that mattered, however inelegantly it happened. During my first few months, it also became clear that providing material conditions to catch on participants in the moment could hardly happen without appealing to their bodily senses. And this, for each workshop, was set up in a highly specific manner.

The episode with Sandro was particularly telling on this point. One morning, while seven teens were leaving for the clay workshop, Sandro did not move at all. I had gotten to know Sandro two days earlier at the painting workshop, where I had confronted him about his sexual jokes towards a younger girl. We had enjoyed a chat, too, about painted ceramic tilework called *azulejos.* Sandro knew them well due to his Portuguese origin. I sat next to him. He did not want to go to the clay workshop because, he muttered to me, due to the little sleep he had had last night, he knew that he would easily be carried away by the group agitation, and things would go awry. I asked him if he had already gone to the clay workshop. "No". "Me neither", I replied, and added that I'd been told about the studio several times due to its very special atmosphere, outside the center. The external and particular location intrigued him a bit. So I went on giving him an idea of what modeling clay was like. I tried to awaken his curiosity with concrete evocations and links between the craftwork of clay and tiles. He agreed to try it out. We then walked out of the building, passed a few houses, and turned onto the path of one of them.  Sandro was surprised to discover this environment, quite distinct from the center.

Entering the small house brought more discoveries. Its interior spatial layout interlaced different areas, with a central table and several side tables in nooks and crannies. More than a corner suggesting distance adjustments, this whole convoluted organization of compartments, caregivers commented later, was arranged to avoid the ordering typical of factories. Indeed, the spatial organization of the atelier circumvented the factory logic of parceling out spaces and people into hierarchical leadership, functional tasks, and interchangeable workers (Bouchy 1981). The compartments eluded the technical and depersonalized organization of spaces that work with a division of tasks and gestures in stiffened chronometric cadences. When we entered, Alix, a ceramist, greeted us with aprons and asked where we wanted to sit. Many teens

#### 112 The Slightest Attachment

were already at the central table. Remembering Sandro's expectation of getting involved in the bustle of the group due to his lack of sleep, I proposed to him that we sit at a table off to the side. Convolution enables such flexibility for irregular placements and, as we'll see, unexpected moves along the way.

*Figure 15: Walking to the clay atelier, with the small brick house at the back.*

Another prominent trait of the clay atelier was intriguing. Compartments held arrays of objects that gave clues about the process of crafting: here, long shelves with dozens of clay sculptures, there, others with pots full of colored pigments, or still manual tools in wood or metal, artworks in the making, an oven, and a pallet full of clay packets in another corner (figure 16). As with the displayed objects in La Porte Bleue, these unusual things were good candidates for tickling curiosity. But here, the coherence between these objects added something else. As much as the small brick house and its location at the back of a garden, the collection of these specific objects featured the clay atelier as a small world apart from the center. Indeed, like the compact discs that music lovers used to amass on shelves, valuing appreciations in practice also leans on material arrangements as they organize specific worlds, with their own tools, aesthetic styles and (temporary) boundaries, offering ways to contemplate or handle these objects (Hennion, Gomart & Maisonneuve 2000: 218–219).

*Figure 16: The objects and compartments of the atelier.*

While Sandro and I settled with the things we'd need, we passed by sculptures of elephants displayed on a window ledge, and started to model pieces off that inspiration. Touching and manipulating the clay increasingly infused the material with more specificity. Sculpting the design involved working the clay until it softened in the heat of our

#### 114 The Slightest Attachment

hands. It involved soft pushes on the dough with our fingertips, flattening it a bit more here, creating a depression there, holding the piece at different angles.We formed different shapes, trying to homogenize their surfaces as best as we could. With the help of tools way sharper than our fingers, we dug, removed, and displaced mass. We curved corners until we rounded their edges. Though the body-object contact mostly passed by the hands, it was also moderated by our aprons which hoarded traces of dirt. Manipulating the clay brought us into intimate contact with it.5 Where spatial convolution enabled irregular seating, the craftwork with its tactile sensibility invited personal interactions with the clay and tools.6 And so we kept smoothing out here, and smoothing out there, until, before the end of the session, Sandro got visibly tired and could not focus anymore. We then passed by the shelves and had a closer look at the many sculptures. Other care centers belonging to this institution also used the atelier, and the collection of artworks was impressive. The numerous handicrafts displayed a diversity of figures and textures. Like our pieces, every sculpture was infused with the unique specificity of a personal creation. The specificity of the clay atelier did not only belong to the type of activity in itself. That atelier also gained singularity when the accumulation of artworks reshaped its specific features.

5 These manipulations echo Sennett's (2008) study about craft culture. He argues that objects become interesting through the development of a "material consciousness" (120). That is, not a consciousness independent from things, but the particular forms of awareness that come throughout the work done with and to a thing we can change (ibid: 119–146).

6 In her history of tactile sensations, Classen (2012: 167–197) recounts how modern institutions set up from the 19th century, like schools, prisons or armies, trained inmates to socially conform through the standardization of movements, leaving few margins for personal touches or idiosyncratic behavior. In schools (although a few students always kept displaying eccentric manners) these uniform bodies were intended to increase the efficiency and productivity of future laborers. Here it seems that what is sought is the opposite of routine discipline: the craftwork fosters an expansion of personal traits, within a setting that exhibits these singular artworks, and draws participants in compelling manipulations without imposing gestural patterns.

The clay atelier made tangible how much each workshop setting, even those that did not involve the creation of artifacts, featured a specific world that appealed to bodily senses in its own way. Touch might not always be the most prominent one, although it was often solicited, whether in gardening, cooking, or assembling mosaics. Watching a movie or playing music obviously emphasized visual and auditory attention, whereas walking through the city or dancing was very much about bodily movements. Each of these corporal practices implied specific sensory richness, and each of their material framing organized a world that called to those senses.

#### **Side slippages**

Then, of course, it also happened that teens' involvement in a workshop failed. When activities took place outside, especially, their conditions were more friable, more porous to unexpected temptations. Hearing caregivers' accounts of outside activities, it stood out how much a group departure or traveling defied stability not only in the moment, but at the venue thereafter. The teens' involvement was easily sidetracked, sometimes precipitating a complete collapse of the activity, and hence put a strain on the care relationship.

Sport fields tended to make the activity drift, maybe because the energetic games worked with rigorous directional cues and stirred the players' excitement. One Friday, we took a tram to reach an indoor football field. Benches for supporters stood along the field, a few meters from the pitch. Like in most sports venues, the fields were coupled with side layouts either for spectators or for the players to rest. Joachim, a fifteen-year-old, did not take part in the game. As I was not taking part either, we both sat on these benches, where he quickly started a chat. He told me about video games, his favorite occupation to which he devotes most of his time, before asking what I do with my spare time. My answer plunged us into a one-hour conversation. We completely forgot about the match, barely arching an eyebrow at occasional interpersonal clashes. Joachim seemed to enjoy it. And so did I. The

next Monday morning, in the team meeting, Baptiste reported on how the sport outing had gone, and turned towards me: "Joachim and you stayed on the side. I didn't come closer to you both, because I felt that something was happening. Would you like to say something about it?" To my surprise, this sideline, informal, and unexpected chat was worth being related to the team. Apparently, such side involvements next to the planned activity were as important for the care work. It required me to immediately sort out what I would relate to the team or not, in order to respect the privacy of the chat I had with Joachim. The football field with its lines on the floor and goals regulated and qualified how teens should move or throw the ball to each other. But these lines also delimited side spaces that offered opportunities for other involvements. Hence crafting other bubbles, like an informal conversation, was part of the whole activity that fed caregivers' exchanges. The teens might want to follow another track, and these deviations gave more possibilities for caregivers to know them and work with them.

Well, this was the case insofar this other track did not threaten the main activity. Venturing outside more likely risked unexpected disturbances, and these disinvolvements could turn the activity upside down. The following week, Baptiste related an outing dedicated to badminton. According to him, it completely failed, starting with the challenge of the departure:

It was such a complicated session. Already when leaving, Emil was glad to have the whole panoply of his sportswear, but then he had forgotten his shorts at home. On the traveling: no problem. But once we arrived on the spot, the hall was busy with a group of young ladies. So David and Aymane started to observe them. We told them ten or so times that we would stay in the cloakroom until everybody was ready and the girls had finished. But it was extremely complicated. Aymane went out all the time, so we had to go to find him. After, on the field, compared to last week, when we had a possibility to play with teens, where we could really be into a sort of exchange between us, this time it was not possible. I think we couldn't end any match. And I also think it's now three times that they have gone there and they are starting to be fed up with it. So it was extremely hard. Eduardo then followed and did at least thirty times his joke, when he taps someone's shoulder and then hides. And he really did it *thir-ty-times* [he emphasized].  […] So when we came back here, we gathered them again in the resting room. […] It was odd because some of them seemed to say they had a great afternoon: Lucien, Aymane, and Eduardo—he has his good reasons. They said the bad atmosphere was due to us [Baptiste and the other caregiver] because we didn't stop reminding everyone of the framework. But then, it was extremely tiresome. I told them that in these conditions, it was difficult to go outside with them.

Baptiste reported the failed activity as a cascading effect: the derailed departure, then the girls were a distraction, and this mess drove Eduardoin his diversion with his above-average sense of humor. To the caregivers, the activity failed not only becauseit was not possible to play. It especially failed because they simply could not share the activity with the adolescents. While doing activities together, caregivers were always reluctant to formalize their relationship with them. Recalling the framework of the activity turned their relationship into an educational one. However, to the teens, the afternoon had been great.They had had a lot of fun running after girls and making jokes. Again, their disinvolvement was part of the care work. It led Baptiste to discuss it with them afterwards in the resting room. And the teens' responses made him wonder if they were 'fed up' with that activity, impelling him to propose another one to better sustain their interest over time (I explore this issue in the next chapter). Even though outings opened up more opportunities to slippages away from the main activity, venturing outside remained central to continuing to work with the adolescents and their unexpected responses to activities. Whether a single teen 'misses the boat' and stays away, or several of them completely ruin a session, these disinvolvements did matter for care work. They could carve new relational tracks (as with Joachim), risk turning caregivers' relationship to teenagers into a corrective one, or provoke the team's interrogation of teens' interests.

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#### **Passages**

The involvement of adolescents took many forms along the workshops I attended or heard about, day after day. Perhaps you feel slightly dizzy at this point, after having been given a taste of these various venues, each evoking a different set of specificities. To be precise, each workshop showed yet another way through which their spatial arrangements were to provide conditions for luring participants into a particular activity. Reaching a state of concentration was set up very differently when watching a movie or writing, as well as when switching from these respective forms of attention towards group exchanges. Other activities, like going to the cinema, demanded aminimal framing.They reliedmore on a practical framework than on a material setting, simply encouraging teens' reflexivity on what they were doing. Overall, the spatial conditions of workshops weren't suggestive like the ambiguous possibilities of the living spaces. What is supposed to be done in an atelier or on a sport field is unequivocal, even if their disposition often leaves margins for each participant to respond in the way they tend to. Think of Karl who, both in the radio and cooking workshops, threw himself into technical tasks butignored opportunities for spontaneousinteraction.Or remember the clay atelier that involved us personally in tactile sensations, inspired by singular handicrafts on shelves, while its layout enabled flexibility for irregular placements.

If each workshop venue and its practical framework are a set of specificities, then I can draw few common traits among them. Except, perhaps, that they are all about easing the passage from one state to another. Law and Moser (1999) argue that being or not being able to do something is, in practice, a matter of good or bad passages between different sets of specificities. A passage can be understood in a material sense, like when the woman in a wheelchair they interview can't board a train because there's no hoist that connects it to the platform. The movement between specific settings, they write, is a set of specificities as well. A passage isn't only material, but also transformative: thanks to a setting, like a hoist, one becomes able to do something that wasn't possible without it. When achieving or falling short of personal goals, the authors continue, all of us make and are made by good or bad passages.

What else were workshop spaces and caregivers doing than creating such passages? I mean, not only material passages (although walks were sometimes included), but transformative passages: the transitions that increased the chances to drive teens into their relational affinities.7 A transformative passage would occur, for instance, when they engrossed or switched their attention, became more curious about something, or experienced, felt, tested bodily movements and senses. I say "increased the chances", because teens'involvement remained an uncertain and unstable form of attachment.They were uncertain because they always happened on a middle path, between a person, things, and other possible mediators. And they were unstable because at any moment they could fade out due to fatigue, conflicts, or distractions on the spot, to name only a few potential roadblocks.These passages show that teens involvement is a form of attachment that comes into existence while remaining on the verge of fading.

Some passages that seem easy in fact prove difficult, like when Jimmy reflected on the duration of screening and called for a revision of the framework. And some passages that initially seem difficult are eventually made easier, for instance, thanks to specific sensory appeals. When facing schoolwork, the curiosity trials and Maud's other adjustments with the spaces of the pedagogical workshop facilitated the teens' passage from apprehension to learning activities. A passage that fails can have good or bad consequences for the care work, or both. Teens'

7 More dimensions are at stake in such a passage than simply shifting from one state to another. Hennion, Gomart and Maisonneuve (2000: 188–204) identify that a passionate state emerges through different forms of passage: swaying between bodily feelings and mind intentions; successful meetings between individual actions and socio-technical apparatuses; shifts from active preparation to being passively caught by a sensation; and passages from technical commands to uncontrollable occurrences. Though the passages I emphasize here mean the transformation of someone' state rather than their traveling, they are significantly different from the 'rites of passage', dear to anthropologists, whose ceremony marks a milestone or major change in someone's life.

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disinvolvement on the sport field opened up the team's reflection on their loss of interest, but also compelled the purely educational relationship from which caregivers wanted to escape as much as possible. In any case, these passages from one state to another, in and out of involvement, oscillating between indifference and a more intense contact, never merely occupied the teens' days. Not a single day flew by without the caregivers reiterating the importance of these passages as they related them. In doing so, they kept deepening their knowledge of each teens' motivations, sensibilities, current difficulties and abilities. And so they kept adjusting their care work according to that informal knowledge, shaped and reshaped by the responses from the adolescents.

## **Chapter 4** Variations of interest, variations of space

Over the year, something else became visible: these material spaces did not stay the same. The photographs below render it clearly. They show the marks of eight months on the yard (figures 17a-b). During that time, the ping-pong table lost its central position, the fresco on the wall was repainted, benches were built with a wooden pallet, and more vegetation was planted. Apparently, caregivers together with the teens made thematerial spaces vary.But why and how did they do that?When I asked Baptiste about these spatial variations, he linked the workshops to the problem of boredom. He described it as follows:

There comes a moment [when] we need to nourish again. Workshops really need to adapt, either because we [caregivers] are bored, or because the youth's group dynamic, who is there at that time, doesn't lend itself to a particular set-up of the activity. So it needs to adapt to the group and to our interest, that is, always keeping [caregivers'] curiosity regarding what we do for our care work. If we do the same thing again [and again], it is not interesting. So a break [from a workshop] is necessary for nourishing again, and for creating the willingness to resume it later.

The caregivers' interest in workshops and the teens' group dynamics had temporalities. At some point, variations were crucial for their interest not to fade into boredom. As in the previous chapter, with the badminton outing that failed, the team often questioned whether the teens were 'fed up' with an activity, causing their disinvolvement. But

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caregivers also needed to maintain their own curiosity in what they were doing. It was necessary for them to turn towards new activities, or boredom risked impoverishing the care work. On one hand, Baptiste further nuanced, boredom was welcome within the frame of an activity, since these "floating moments" would "leave opportunities for teenagers to seize it [to do something with it]". This nuance recalls the framing of uncertain involvement in the previous chapter. But on the other hand, boredom was a problem in the long run, because, he added: "if the caregiver does not carry the wish for the workshop [anymore], the participants won't be wanting [to do it] after a while, if not from the outset." In short, the caregivers' lasting interest in the activities they led was a vital support for participants' involvement. Whereas in the previous chapters, I noted that participants' familiarity with living spaces or involvement in an activity emerged out of indifference, here a lasting interest had to forestall boredom over time. No interest could survive without variation, just as always eating the same meal would make you lose your appetite.

*Figures 17a: The yard of the old townhouse in June 2013.*

*Figure 17b: The yard of the old townhouse in March 2014.*

In this chapter I take up the challenge of exploring how variations of material spaces relate to the revival of interest. Teens' and caregivers' interest is a form of attachment that extended my research focus, from the very moments when their sensations manifested together through their engagements with objects, towards the collective of people and equipment that allowed their tastes to change over time, along with their evanescence and revival (Hennion, Gomart & Maisonneuve 2000: 143–145).The stories I assemble below cover longer periods of time compared to the daily scenes of interactions I have described so far. With these stories I examine how the team and the adolescents succeeded or failed to maintain their interest in activities, through several strategies aiming at enrolling one another in affinities current to the group. I recognize such strategies of enrollment in the hybrid arrangements of the building, in caregivers' exchanges about daily events, in their discussions with teens during community meetings or in their subse-

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quent adjustments of chosen activities, and their interest also varied in a less formal manner in what we called 'waves'. By scrutinizing different spatial variations, it will come into view that sustaining interest often relies on slight, furtive forms of attachment, such as familiarity with the teens or their involvement in a moment. The smallest of these attachments nourished the care work: every little teen affinity could count for caregivers, no matter how small. It turned out, too, that sustaining interest could increase the importance of these modest affinities to the point of materializing them in the institutional place, keeping this place attuned to what currently mattered within the group.

#### **A pragmatic view of interest**

As I continued to ask questions about spatial variations, several caregivers emphasized how much they took shape between their interests and that of the teens. Berenice articulated it this way:

We need to take pleasure in workshops because, if you do a workshop that you cannot carry with enough pleasure, then it doesn't work [teens do not get involved in it]. […] Meanwhile it is important to consider how we readapt it to teens. So it should meet the team's and the teenagers' interest. For instance, if one group of teens says there are not enough sports, then we can add some. And at the same time, some workshops always remain. ... But, yes, for sure, that means that the spaces will vary accordingly!

A 'variation' was not just about caregivers' and teens' individual pleasure in the moment. Rather, a variation germinated with the emergence of an interest between certain caregivers, teenagers, and an ongoing or potential activity. Such an understanding meets a pragmatic view on 'interest'. Dewey (1983 [1916]; 2011 [1939]: 93) argues that an interest does not preexist "in" an individual or a group, but it develops as a relation between people and their aims, and encompasses the means for connecting them. An interest is not static, nor it is reduced to a psychological concern, but it's a practical, enduring activity that can also chafe against obstacles. Remember Kevin who, at some point, despite the considerable deepening of his interest in care for animals, eventually ran away to roam the city. He was carried along by other aspirations, and by other means on which the team had little grip. But in their practice, the caregivers used particular mediations that allowed me to look, as Dewey proposes, at the concrete means and obstacles that contribute to the social process of realizing interests. Such interests are redefined in interaction with others, who then become involved. In this way, interest can progressively lead to a renewed situation.

In the day center, one such means for the collective realization of interests was a chart of the weekly program of activities. It was a big polystyrene panel, with movable activity labels fastened with bits of Velcro, and it stood on the mantle of a fireplace, right in the middle of the caregivers' office (figure 18). On its left side, the panel included about twenty workshops that had been previously done.They constituted a sort of reserve of activities that had proved to be ofinterest but were currently not planned.This side column was then an intermediary space for interests that came and went. Each year, in early September, the team held a meeting to revise the schedule. But the labels danced on that polystyrene panel during the year as well, passing back and forth across its columns, and in and out of the panel, depending whether they were of interest or not during a period of time. Each week, Berenice used the panel to adapt the program and she completed it with more details on a Word document. She then reprinted it and posted it on the door of the office, to make it easy to glance at. The chart enabled all to visualize the growth and demise of interests shared in the day center over time. It pointed to more unpredictable flows of appreciation that could come along the year, making one wonder how this would occur.

But Berenice mentioned another feature of interest. Some activities were permanent. They remained interesting on a stable basis. These everlasting interests in unchanging activities were indeed visible in caregivers' annual reports.1 Amid the bunches of renewed activities that popped up every few years, some of them didn't change. Yet they

1 I analyzed these reports back to eight years prior to my arrival.

were able to be modified when needed. Horse riding was one of the activities that never fell out of fashion. Marion, the accompanying caregiver, reported numerous therapeutic aspects that manifested during sessions. She described how teens ventured into new bodily sensations, or wove special relationships with the horses. Year after year, several teens were always keen to sign up for it. But questions arose along the way. It happened, for instance, that Marion wondered about the strict framework required by riding instructors at the farm. Instructors didn't know about teens' particular troubles, which Marion saw as a good thing in a readaptation context. But at some point, the adolescents manifested a need for more flexibility towards them and their difficulties. Marion then adapted the framework by establishing a talking time at the end of each session, so that participants could express what they had gone through, and share it with the instructors. Thus, even with activities sufficiently interesting to secure a lingering spot in the weekly program, internal adaptations occurred throughout their realization.

Despite the permanence of certain activities, in this chapter my challenge is to understand how workshop modifications could grow big enough to bring about spatial changes. In order to maintain interest over time, caregivers and teens reoriented their approach towards new activities. For this, they followed particular processes. Callon and Law's (1982) examination of how interests take shape in scientists' practice is particularly helpful here. An interest may succeed or fail, they write, through "strategies of enrollment" (619), that is, specific processes of seeking out the interests of others, of attempting to make something of value to them. The submission of a paper to a scientific journal entails such strategies of enrollment, like when the content of the first paragraph illustrates a wider issue with a specific one. When scientists explore which journal to target, they too assess how each would better catch and transform readers' interests. Unfortunately, this transformation may not succeed. The editors may reject the paper, or they may give feedback that proposes to transform the authors' interest. An 'enrollment', then, denotes the actions and ruses through which a role is attributed to someone else who will accept it, if they become interested,

and these attempts can be reciprocal.2 The notion of 'strategies of enrollment' refines my pragmatic view of interest: it enables a closer look into the variations I encountered in the day center, because it points to strategies operated in the aim of forming an interest that is liable to change. More than the social and practical processes Dewey signals, this approach to the transformation of interests is "precisely about how it is that the small become big (or vice versa), and why it is that some succeed while others fail" (ibid: 621). It thus points, too, to the constitution of certain social and material worlds, and to the dissolution of others. So what were the strategies of enrollment in the day center? How did caregivers' and teens' interests transform? And how did the variations of material spaces relate to these revivals of interest?

*Figure 18: A tool for revisions during the year: the flexible chart on a polystyrene panel.*

2 About this understanding of 'interest' as a translation process (or, roughly said, as an ensemble of relationships that entail the transformation of a social and natural world), see also Callon's (1986) famous analysis of the controversy about the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay.

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#### **Hybrid buildings**

There was, of course, one tangible means that I could hardly ignore when looking for enrollment in shared interests: the buildings. Not the edifices of the old house or the new one in themselves, but that both were hybrid. The day just before the official inauguration, I came across two cleaning ladies hired by an external company. After having spent two days cleaning the whole new building, they could not help wondering, they told me with a mix of confusion and curiosity, "what is this building?! What is thisinstitution that contacted our company?What do they do?"No typology of building they knew was recognizable in that hybrid structure. It is not a home, but its living spaces are central. It is not a cultural center, but it has workshop rooms of all sorts. It is not a school, but two of its rooms serve the atypical pedagogic setting of La Porte Bleue. It is not a hospital, but it has a nursery and consultation rooms. It is not a park, but it has a big garden with two benches, each flanked by a waste bin. But it is an institution, indeed; it has a secretary desk, waiting seats at the entrance, and several corridors. The cleaning ladies' wondering about the building brought to mind other newcomers' astonishment about its unusual and unidentifiable aspect, whether they were teenagers, new trainees or caregivers, delivery workers, or other external visitors. These buildings were typologically hybrid. This way, they avoided becoming spaces with conventional purpose. They worked with patches of different arrangements for situations that usually occur in different places.

But the thing was, the hybrid typology of these buildings didn't suffice to make room for variations of interest within the group. In a meeting for preparing the resettlement, while caregivers bent over the architects' plans and examined the rooms for distributing activities, several voices reminded that, anyway, the rooms should "remain open to change". This request didn't frighten the architects. From the start of the collaboration, they had been told that the team worked with ongoing questioning. Since the architects wished to equip the care center as best as possible, they accepted to leave the building partially undefined.Their strategy was to design rooms of diverse size, shape, light, acoustics, texture, and withdrawn or centrally located space.This diversity could make

this or that room better suitable to try in this or that workshop. Moreover, when the group settled in, they dispersed tools or materials among these spots, without strictly delineating a unique purpose for each of them. Rather, the different spots of the hybrid building were permeated with objects drawing fuzzy boundaries about the kind of activity that might be done here or there. The team gave these spots some vague names, too, offering clues about an imprecise ensemble of activities, like 'sport', 'creation', 'relaxation', 'media', etc. The rooms' diversity of shapes, together with their imprecise boundaries due to their contents and names, left them open to later variations by offering a diversity of options for setting up a workshop. The partially undefined building would then become even more hybrid according to new interests that would emerge over the course of the practice.

From there, a variation might be of very different scale, from small to more consequent interventions, and it might enroll more or fewer people and means. Note the following contrast between two workshops, both stemming from community meetings with teens. One aimed to explore the theme of 'adulthood' and was barely defined at its start. The first sessions would take form as meetings with all participants. They would browse through different themes about becoming adults, then decide on outings or other activities to engage with this topic. When caregivers discussed where to do that workshop, they looked for a 'convivial setting' that might help to cultivate interest in exchanges while making these meetings pleasurable moments. Caregivers first thought to do it in the living spaces, but these ones too easily led teens to "collapse on the couches" or to turn towards other potentially distracting opportunities. Instead they needed something more formal, but still providing pleasure. After considering several options, they decided that the bright room of the first floor would work – the room that was also chosen for the writing atelier in chapter three. Its central table would host the meeting, and the computers on the side could eventually be used for a little research. But it would work, with a small variation of bringing in a tray with a teapot, cups, and cookies, placed in the middle of the table.3

In contrast, a gardening workshop drove far more consequences and spatial rearrangements. One morning, Louis, a technical worker of the institution, was assembling a shed in a corner on the terrace of the new building. On the other side of the garden, Sylvie, a caregiver, was weeding. When I approached her to ask about this gardening activity, she branched her answer out into a wealth of stories. It started with these flowers planted by an official gardener to make the place 'nice' for the inauguration. She strongly disliked these exotic ornamentals. So she discreetly pulled them out, she said to me in a slight laugh, and replaced them with the kind of flowers she liked. Meanwhile, this lured some teens to join her. They decided together to seed some vegetables that then grew, and Josie cooked them. But Sylvie needed to learn more skills for furthering that workshop, for better grounding the adolescents' interest. With another caregiver, they went to a one-day training in vegetable gardening. At that time, by chance they learned that Sami, the head of the institution's technical workers, was passionate about gardening and knew a lot about it. Since then, as soon as they had a question, they would call him. He, too, became committed to improving that spot and growing veggies. To Sylvie, every element in these stories counted. Especially since teens' interest in that garden was fluctuating over time, some new tools, the seeds, a shed, skills, Sami's advice, or Josie's cooking; all were necessary to keep it alive. Whereas a variation might suffice by enhancing a table with a tea set, here it gathered many ingredients that nourished participants' interest, along which the garden varied with its flowers, vegetables, sheds and equipment.

Departing from the partially undefined building, a variation could involve a bunch of social and material transformations, or minimal ones.

3 Such minimal interventions in spatial arrangements for heightening pleasure closely echoes Vogel and Mol (2014). They recount from the weight consultants they interviewed how material surroundings could contribute to cultivate pleasure in eating, as it would not be distracting (for instance with media) but attractive (as with a nicely set table).

It could enroll more or less people, means, and money. The aim was to create the right conditions for keeping caregivers and teens interested in their daily activities. Whatever its size, each variation increased the hybrid, unconventional aspect of the building, making it more specific to the appreciations and concerns that took shape within the group over time.

#### **Intriguing daily events**

But then, the strategy adopted in the arrangements and uses of the building left a blind spot: how did caregivers and teens translate their ideas or first-hand experiences into greater, broader interests? Meetings, to which I turn now, were a central means for that process. In the previous chapters I described how caregivers related everyday stories during their staff meetings, continually reshaping an informal knowledge about each adolescent, their familiar bonds, involvement in activities, and surprising changes, however piecemeal. Now I want to emphasize another path in which these daily exchanges resulted. The small, seemingly insignificant occurrences that caregivers related in meetings and daily chats were a fertile ground, too, for a growing revival of interest.

This became clear with the story of the staff 's new resting room. In the new building, this room was designed as a 'break room' for the team. It catered to norms about workers' need for breaks during the day. But its location away from the living spaces, common office, and nearby hotspots posed a problem. The caregivers had to cross a corridor and go to an upper floor to reach it. So they did not go there. It was, they explained to me, "too disconnected from the life of the center", which was "not the way we work... At least, not for now". From what exactly did they refuse to disconnect when being away from the "life of the center"? Sylvie specified, "[The caregivers' office] is a crossing point where information circulates and we catch it. And if you're not there, you don't have the information. Well, you'll have it later in a meeting, but it's not the same." And she added, with a playful smile, "you don't

have the anecdote, you don't have the little gems." Sylvie pointed to an ongoing mode of communication in the care practice. When caregivers passed by in their office, they used to tell each other about situations that had just happened with the youths. These anecdotes enabled them to share much more interesting stories with colleagues, compared to the synthetic versions communicated in meetings, because fresh anecdotes led to spontaneous advice on how to improvise a right response to a youth and to their state of the day.

The staff break room foregrounded how much caregivers' closeness to daily events in the center mattered, and enabled them to work by discussing occurrences they'd just noticed. In chapter two, I wrote of the surprising minor changes to the familiar portrait that caregivers came to associate with each teen. I wrote of Safia's unusual attitude that contrasted with her earlier stillness. One of the unusual things she did was to take a dance step to one side as she encountered her image in a mirror. When she did it again another day, Berenice was around, who then started to do it with her. It turned into a funny moment that Berenice related during the next morning meeting: "I was behind, mimicking her movements and sometimes asked her to change to another move. […] It was so funny! I don't know what she had that day, but she was in a good shape!  The dance step story sparked interest among the staff, especially since Safia had barely started to engage outside of her quiet routines.The team then spoke about resuming a hip-hop dance workshop. A trainee was sufficiently skilled to lead it. They scanned some facilities where they might find a room.The idea was launched; they now had to test it. So the caregivers cultivated an interest by being around the adolescents in a familiar place, and by relating small but surprising occurrences to the team.

In workshops, too, caregivers identified potentially interesting events. A memorable one happened when the group of La Porte Bleue went out to a circus school. The next day, Maud reported that the teens had wrapped themselves in fabrics that hung from wooden beams. Her account captivated the team. "It was like a bodily constraint", she said, "but an interesting one". Her interlocutors fell silent. She pursued:

With those fabrics, you can go up, put yourself inside, and it swings a bit because it is hanging. It's really like a cocoon… And this has such an effect! There is such a silence during these moments. The calming effect it may create is just astonishing. … And Martin loves this thing. And this is lasting – I mean, it's not for three minutes. He stays in it. Ingrid asked: And Kevin did it too?!

Her surprise was shared among the caregivers. They all knew too well that Kevin, who had not yet run away at that time, was most often unable to be still. Maud answered:

Yes, but Kevin goes less than Martin, and he stays less long in it. And he hangs over it. His arms fall and his leg goes up like this [she throws her limbs in several directions]. Well, it's not exactly the same. But Martin, he really took to it! He put himself in it, like this, like a restraint, but in the good sense of that term.

The effect of the fabric supports intrigued most of the caregivers.The experience had lured in the teens, brought calm or fun according to each of them. The team then gauged if it might be possible to hang some fabric supports in a relaxation room of the new building. The teens' involvements with the fabric supports were small occurrences and they happened only a few times, yet even so, they were tasty ingredients for the caregivers. Of course, their interest was also due to their concern about the teens' frequent agitation and about bodily constraint, which is a sensitive matter for those who have experienced it in other psychiatric settings. Speculating about possibly good and calming constraints with agitated teens made the story even more interesting to the team. This special concern fostered a possible variation of their practice and to their material space.

Sometimes, though, the team took cues from other information than daily events occurring in the living spaces or in workshops. When presenting a newcomer prior to his arrival, for instance, ideas might grow. At a meeting, the psychiatrist spoke about Gery, a teenager who entered the following week. After explaining his troubles, particularly his learning disorders, he mentioned the boy's keenness on all things mechanical. Bike repair was his specialty. The second he said that, all faces turned to Eric. All knew of his willingness to bicycle with the teens. Eric smiled back and clarified that he was not exactly a good mechanic. "Well", replied the psychiatrist, "but you could set up a bicycle repair workshop in which Gery would be the expert. I think he needs to be valued in concrete operations like that". That the teen's affinity could hold a therapeutic potential sounded like a good argument. Everyone agreed with the psychiatrist' proposal, which would then be put to the test once Gery was there. It thus happened that caregivers' interest for a new activity found roots in the taste of an adolescent that happened to match theirs, and even promised therapeutic potential.

Yet most of the time, their strategy of enrollment went through their noticing of small, intriguing occurrences in the daily life they shared. The teens' familiarity and their involvement in workshops nourished caregivers' anecdotes and staff meetings with unpredictable occurrences, with appreciations that could intensify in a moment. Here the team did not compare the adolescents' responses in order to better know them.4 But they shared those daily events by linking them to issues that were of their proper concern or affinity. Caregivers' reports of those occurrences to the rest of the team comprised a strategy of enrollment that triggered the formation of new interests.This strategy gave to those small occurrences the possibility to drive changes in their practice and place.

#### **Expanding zones, drawing boundaries**

Animportant point about staffmeetings was that caregivers related their notes about the teens in their shared office, where the latter were absent. The team spoke of moments they had experienced with the adolescents, yet without directly discussing these incidents with them. And, needless to say, teens and caregivers weren't always on the same wavelength.

4 See chapter two, 'Workspaces for informal knowledge' and chapter three, 'Relating involvement'.

The weekly community meetings, in contrast, allowed face-to-face exchanges. Teens and caregivers gathered to express and share all kinds of issues about their institutional life, and to propose ideas of what they would like to do. Caregivers valued new ideas that could alter some established customs in the facility. It would give, in their words, "a bit of fresh air" to their practice.The community meeting was another strategy of enrollment, through which the range of ideas that could become of interest in the group easily expanded.Meanwhile, these meetings also provided a keen taste of which ingredients were not palatable for the team or for the teens. Quite often, during these direct confrontations, the group had to redefine the boundaries of its zones of interest.

How did that happen? Each week, a new sheet of paper was pinned on a cork panel in the living space, on which everyone could list ideas for the next meeting. This piece of paper was a draft agenda that was then completed during the discussion, pinned back onto the panel, and later consigned to a binder.5 Participants shared all kinds of subjects that concerned the organization of daily community life, often provoking a tense atmosphere among the teens.They regularly mentioned the material environment, too,in debate about its decoration, damages, or cleanliness. These uneasy moments seemed quite necessary, for they allowed the team's and adolescents' concerns to meet, clash, and be reshuffled.

To caregivers, the point was to do activities that were therapeutically interesting, that is, activities that induced teens to respond to a proposal, so that the team could work with these responses. To what extent a proposition should be framed as 'therapeutic' remained under debate within the team, as discussed in chapter three about the framing of minimal conditions of everyday activities. Caregivers might bring in ideas of their own taste, but always made sure that these proposals concerned the life of the group, like when choosing what to cook for the upcoming Christmas meal. The only limits were money and insurance conditions for risky outings.

5 I attended a dozen community meetings. To get a better sense of the issues at stake and their debates, I read about sixty archived reports going back to two years prior to my arrival on the field.

The teens, as far as I discerned, were not concerned by the therapeutic potential of activities. They mostly wanted to have fun, or at least a good time. Video games, sports, listening to music, accessing a punching ball or a computer, or where and when they were allowed to smoke, were rather their concern. As with outings like theme parks, paintball, go karts, or watching horror movies, some activities that they requested were denied, because caregivers deemed they could incite violent attitudes. Baptiste told me, "It's ok if they do it outside [during their time of not being in the center], but then I tell them that for a group of teenagers in psychiatry, it is not something easy to manage, and we would not encourage that".

But the teens also had their boundaries, which were debated in meeting after meeting. It could even happen that these limits launched a boycott. One day Martin, a youth, put an item on the agenda with which most of his fellows agreed: "no community meetings anymore". This was not so surprising to caregivers; for several weeks, few adolescents had brought an issue to the meetings. Most of them had "nothing to say". They asserted that issues in these meetings were just not interesting. Some caregivers recognized that "something had changed" in recent meetings, which they had also noticed spatially: teens and caregivers did not mingle anymore when sitting together, and they paid less attention to whether the 'broken circle' formed by their chairs enabled everyone to see and hear each participant. When facing the teens' stony silence, it was quite clear that the only way Baptiste was ever going to be able to handle the situation was by reawakening their interest. So he returned the teens' statement in the form of a question: "when is an issue interesting or not, to you?" Martin and other participants replied that "interesting stuff " should be of concern to most of the people attending meetings, and not be repeated over time. From there, some pending propositions could be reopened. They checked whether each issue concerned everyone, and whether it varied from previous subjects.The story of that blockage, though, makes plain that the community meeting was a core strategy in directly engaging the teens and in modulating the zones of interest and pace of their variations.

However, the extension of interests within the group and delineation of their boundaries wasn't only at stake during these meetings.The caregivers still had to carry out the actual realization of proposals. This required other strategies of enrollment. Some of the teens' propositions could start on the wrong track for sparking the caregivers' and other participants'interest,and therefore required adjustment along the way.This happened when some of the youths wanted to go visit a cemetery.The accompanying caregivers were at first rather cold about it, in part because other teenagers feared such a visit. But the proposers kept insisting. So caregivers found a compromise by pairing the visit with a storyteller. She used narratives to frame the walk with the theme of death and its possible evocations. It worked quite well, so the storyteller was hired for further visits to other sites to be practiced as storytelling walks. That variation in practice enabled the enrollment of participants who were at first reluctant.

It also happened the other way around, that the accomplishment of a proposition threatened a nascent interest along the way because it proved too demanding and long-lasting. One bunch of teenagers were initially very enthusiastic to improve two rooms where they had been dwelling. Choosing pieces and colors was exciting during the first sessions. But when participants had to keep painting walls and to remain concentrated while doing repetitive technical gestures, they grew weary. Caregivers had to constantly push to keep it going. They eventually achieved the work alone. They still remember having grown remarkably tired of it.The renovation made sense to all the participants, but their interest in the activity was far from easy to sustain from start to finish.