This book has explored what is at stake when negotiations of political belonging occur directly through everyday practices of belonging in homes. It is based on a relational understanding of the state where the state emerges through the contestation and struggle of differentially positioned and socially situated actors. It has linked state reproduction (processes of political belonging) with social reproduction (the discursive ideology and practices of care necessary to maintain and reproduce human life), paying particular attention to the role of space.

This book has introduced and elaborated on the notion of ‘intimate state encounters’. Three main contributions arise from this notion. The first contribution is the movement from ‘state acts’ to ‘state encounters’. Encounters foreground how the dichotomy between ‘state’ and ‘community’ needs to be unpacked and not assumed. This processual approach reveals the relational production of identities for all social actors engaged in the encounter. In particular, this lens makes a contribution to theory on street-level bureaucracy because it opens analysis to include the complexity of frontline work, avoiding explanations that rely on assuming roles and relationships and resorting to problematic dichotomies of ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ identities or ‘front-’ and ‘back-’stage performances. This perspective is crucial as frontline workers’ roles are increasingly blurred (see Chapter Two).

The second contribution is the importance of spatial effects, context and intersectional analysis, in this case the productive space of the home. Through focusing on the home space, and the situated positions of social actors in that space, many different literatures can be brought together, including debates on public and private space, gendered critiques of the state, the politics of care, housing studies and urban marginalisation, social work theory, and the anthropological literature on spatialised, relational and affective states. Attention to spatial effects reveals the potential for relational labour through hosting and intimacy. Hosting allows ostensibly dependent or devalued populations to purchase some sort of social belonging, and opens the potential for political belonging. Attention to intersectional analysis reveals frontline workers’ processes of care for Romanian Roma at a moment when their own citizenship rights and duties are being reconfigured in profound ways. Intimate state encounters make an intervention into literature on migrants’ ‘deservingness’, the politics of care and compassion, and neoliberal restructuring of welfare states (see later).