Establishing a Relationship: Establishment Processes of Counseling and Work Relationships within the Field of Outreach Work. An Ethnography within the Context of Prostitution

Proceeding from a discourse on prostitution with which especially normative implications are associated for social work that operates as supporting and processing entity in the welfare state, the study at hand places a focus on the daily routines of outreach work within the context of prostitution in their situative dimensions.  
The relation of body, prostitution, and social work can be described as a rather marginalized and hardly processed field within the scientific research. In this sense, this is remarkable since it can be assumed that especially in the field of prostitution, a particular relevance can be ascribed to corporality. Thereby, sex work is not only described as a body-related occupation, but the body of the sex workers is constructed time and again as the “other”, “foreign” body discursively which conflicts with the hegemonial concepts of sexuality and corporality. Occasionally, this forms the basis of legitimization for social work to take action in this context. The analysis focuses on the following questions adopting a perspective that follows a body-phenomenology/praxeology an ethnographical approach:

• What meaning do body, corporality, and corporeality bear for relationship work and establishing a working relation in outreach work within the context of prostitution?  
• To what extent are the subjective and the objective body involved in the formation of socio-pedagogical working relations regarding the situative interaction relationships? 

On the one hand, the study offers an ethnography of outreach work within the context of prostitution which, above all, investigates the paradoxes and uncertainties of professionally acting social workers. On the other hand, it can be understood as an education science analysis within a socio-pedagogical context of action, which is influenced by the sociology of the body, which focuses on the social practices between social workers and sex workers in their subjective/objective body performance. The goal of the study is to produce insights regarding the situative performance of working relations in a precarious field of work with the help of detailed empirical analyses of social call situations of social workers within the context of prostitution. Bringing forth these insights takes into account the fragile nature and failure of practices as a constitutive and structural possibility of socio-pedagogical relationship work.  
As a result, the focus will be on the subjective/objective dimension of social practices during social call situations of the social workers in the working environment of the sex workers. Social works and sex works maintain a relationship with each other through their bodies via gestures, facial expressions, looks, but also movements and postures. The body is not only to be understood as a means of expressions, but there are also social positions and forms of addressing that are negotiated with the body, which can be read as practices of negotiating power relations and the need of support and help within the socio-pedagogical context. As such, they are accompanied by different (im)possibilities and (in)security relations for the respective actors.