Reading Vincent Lyon-Callo’s book “Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance,” the talk about staff definitely reminded me of the shelter I am interning at.  It speaks about the staff being professionally trained to fix the people who come in, and that is exactly how it is at my shelter.  There is a very particular training for a specific type of person, and it does not apply to all of the residents at the shelter at all.  All of the residents, however, are grouped into this category that makes them all seem as though they came from the exact same situation.  The shelter I am interning at is a domestic violence shelter, and so there are some similarities between the women, but there is not a cookie cutter story behind them all.  Every resident comes with their own very different story, and it is up to the staff to decide how to deal with that situation.  For the most part, the staff treat them all the same regardless of what has happened to them or what the resident has come from.

http://www.amazon.com/Inequality-Poverty-Neoliberal-Governance-Ethnographies/dp/1442600861