Severe and Multiple Disadvantage [SMD] only recently entered the lexicon of research, practice, and policy-making in 2015. However, it is embedded in a lineage of concepts and practices that have sought to intervene upon the lives of individuals who are deemed complex, or are socially excluded, and who represent a social problem. National and localised research have constituted an SMD demographic of individuals around which policies have been directed and services funded and which has culminated in the Changing Futures Programme, launched in 2020 by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government.
By adopting a post-structural approach, the research unpicks the self-evidence of SMD as an objective social problem within policy and analyses the complex ways in which SMD has been produced, regulated and contested. Through critical policy analysis and creative, collaborative methods I have examined the power and knowledge relations that manifest in the regulation (and self-regulation) of people experiencing SMD. Through these methods I have undertaken an analysis that compares the representation of SMD in policy with the lived experience of people considered to be facing SMD, which has enabled a consideration of the effects of these representations.
Though SMD is currently a popular topic of social research, none to date has sought to problematize the concept and ground it in a post-structural epistemology. Moreover, this doctoral research addresses an important gap by increasing the range of voices within SMD research through collaborative approaches that amplify the ‘subjugated knowledges’ of lived experience. This critical qualitative approach will therefore generate credible knowledge at a crucial time in the development and implementation of a concept, and as such aims to impact future policy development.
