More Than Making Do: Towards a Generative Account of Getting by on Welfare Benefits

Introduction

The capacity of individuals to manage and impact difficult situations beyond their control has been at the heart of contemporary theorisations of poverty (Lister, 2004: 145). This has been part of a broader shift in welfare research to prioritise ‘the creative, reflexive welfare subject’ (Williams et al., 1999: 7) in a way that promotes dignity and challenges assumptions of passivity and dependence. Over the same period social policy has increasingly targeted change in personal choice and behaviour to make disadvantaged individuals and communities more responsible and resilient in the long term. The agency of the poor has become an object of conditional welfare policies aimed at ‘activating’ the stifled self-reliance of so-called ‘welfare dependants’ and of development initiatives to build the adaptive skills and resources of individuals, families and communities. Given the growing emphasis on individual agency in both policy and scholarship since the 1990s (Wright, 2012), scrutinising the capacities of welfare recipients is both a familiar and fraught endeavour.

This article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the sociology of everyday life by focusing on everyday practices of getting by on welfare payments. It sets out to pay attention to the vivacity and complexity of lived lives on welfare while scrutinising the politics of agency that animate interest in those lives and the tales we as researchers tell about them. Writing for this journal, Back (2015: 832) has argued that sociological stories of ‘damage, hopelessness and injustice’ are compelling but crowd out ‘moments of the repair and hope in which a livable life is made possible’. Unangax scholar Tuck (2009) also points to the cost of imagining marginalised communities as invariably damaged and depleted when research is driven by a strategy of documenting harm and injury in order to achieve reparation. She advocates desire as an alternative research frame: ‘Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities’ (Tuck, 2009: 417). But stories of hope are also fraught in a cultural politics of welfare that attributes deservingness to those who display the right blend of misfortune and fortitude (Mitchell, 2020). The challenge is to tell of hope amid the privations of welfare without falling into overly rosy accounts of resilience or reinforcing the expectation that people face difficult situations with plucky resolve.

Australia’s residual social security system has long been strictly means and assets tested, but the benefits targeted at lower-income recipients have become increasingly meagre and conditional in the last three decades. Receipt of most benefits is conditional on meeting activity requirements, accompanied by surveillance and penalties for non-compliance. Australia has seen a gradual rollout of measures to regulate the use of income support by issuing payments on a card, which excludes the purchase of certain items and the withdrawal of cash. Known as welfare quarantining, the measure was originally imposed on remote Aboriginal communities in 2007 but has since been extended to non-Indigenous welfare recipients and regional and urban trial sites around the country. The controversial measure has drawn renewed criticism for doing more harm than good and being racially discriminatory as the Australian government moves to make blanket income control permanent in sites where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander recipients remain disproportionately impacted (Klein, 2020). While eligibility for social security has tightened, government expenditure on welfare has grown during this period, especially on pensions, family support and health. Government intervention has continued to maintain the real income of many poor Australians (see Mendes, 2017).

In Australia’s settler colonial and multicultural context, socio-economic inequalities intersect with experiences of colonisation or migration for Indigenous and culturally diverse communities excluded from accessing mainstream societal resources and opportunities. Theorising the distinctiveness of Indigenous poverty, Walter (2009) situates it in the intersection of socio-economic deprivation, the social and spacial separation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, the outside scrutiny and denigration of Indigenous culture, and the dispossession of land and life chances. This approach places ‘unequal power dynamics embedded in Indigenous settler relations’ at the core of Indigenous poverty (Walter, 2009: 12). Foregrounding power relations refuses to pathologise ‘culture’ as a cause of disadvantage; how everyday practices are seen in policy, politics and media contributes to disadvantage and the way it is addressed.

In this article I focus on the generative dimensions of getting by, drawing on qualitative empirical research with a diverse group of welfare users. The article zooms in on mundane and muted gestures of care and modest projects and accomplishments that may seem inconsequential but nonetheless make life liveable (Back, 2015). I argue that the sustenance and hope embedded in practices of getting by tend to be absorbed back into the reactive orientation of much research on lived experiences of welfare. This may be at the expense of recognising the value of activities and ways of being that occur in excess of instrumental ends or normative ideas of ‘good resilience’. This article takes up the challenge to draw attention to the moments and practices that enrich difficult lives without romanticising or ennobling them.

Agency, Coping and Resilience

In Australia, like other Anglo-liberal democracies, social policy strategies promoting resilience have tended to be individual behavioural interventions targeted at populations deemed vulnerable, including Indigenous and culturally diverse populations. Even when the emphasis is on family or community resilience, interventions tend to prioritise developing the skills and self-help capacities of individuals (Bottrell, 2013). Critical scholars have argued that individualised framings of resilience – in tandem with ideologies of individual responsibility and active citizenship – characterise it as a personal accomplishment, distracting attention from the structural factors that put people in a position where they must withstand adversity (Bottrell, 2013; Harrison, 2012). The fraught politics of resilience is a reminder of the need to situate accounts of getting by within a critique of how individual agency is conceptualised and politicised in contemporary social policy.

Studies of everyday experiences of getting by are situated within a broad turn in social policy literature since the 1990s to the capacity of people to ‘be active agents in shaping their own lives’ (Williams et al., 1999: 1). Titterton (1992) influentially argued that welfare research needed to account for differential vulnerability and resilience to adversity to redress an over-emphasis on the structural determinants of poverty at the expense of individual agency. He proposed examining how different coping strategies ‘mediate’ reactions to social challenges and their outcomes. A vast literature documents the routines, skills, materials and networks people draw on to cope with inadequate income (e.g. Andres and Round, 2015; Hall, 2016; Patrick, 2017) and manage the stigma and trauma associated with poverty (e.g. McKenzie, 2015; Mitchell, 2020; Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013).

Much of this empirical work depicts welfare users as active navigators of welfare systems as opposed to passive dependants on public payments. Finding ways around spending money takes time and energy (Hall, 2016; Patrick, 2017), as does fulfilling the requirements attached to conditional payments (Murphy et al., 2011). People find ways of deflecting the stigma of poverty and welfare by distancing themselves from tarnished welfare identities and upholding alternative markers of dignity and value (Patrick, 2017; Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013). Ethnographic research in impoverished neighbourhoods or housing estates in particular has shown how structures of family and community care provide practical resources in times of struggle and a source of purpose and pride (McKenzie, 2015; Smith, 2017). However, coping is not inherently constructive or successful; it can come at the cost of health (Harrison, 2012), social capital (McKenzie, 2015), time and emotional strain (Patrick, 2017), dignity (Mitchell, 2020), debt (Marston and Shevellar, 2014) and destructive behaviour towards self or others (Hoggett, 2001).

Emphasis on the activity of welfare users has prompted efforts to refine the conceptual models of agency underpinning welfare research. Lister (2004: 129) seeks to clarify the forms of agency that remain possible for relatively powerless welfare users. She differentiates between ‘consequential’ strategies and the more mundane practices of making ends meet, which she labels as ‘strategic agency’ and ‘everyday agency’ respectively. She also distinguishes between ‘personal agency’ associated with individual livelihood and ‘political/citizenship agency’ expressed in efforts to challenge or change wider systems (Lister, 2004: 129, emphases in original). These different dimensions form the axis of her four-quadrant typology. She locates ‘getting by’ in the ‘everyday-personal’ quadrant of her schema but notes that some forms of getting by embody a more resistant quality, particularly strategies associated with navigating social welfare. Importantly, Lister insists that this schema is a continuum that ‘categorizes actions not actors’, meaning that the four forms of agency she identifies are not mutually exclusive and ‘not all expressions of agency can be neatly classified’ (Lister, 2004: 129). By unpacking the different orientations of expressions of agency, Lister helps clarify the differing stakes and possibilities for change that they embody.

Critical social policy scholars informed by psychosocial theories have argued for the need to understand how identity makes action possible and what forms of agency certain identifications open up (Hoggett, 2000; Hunter, 2003; Taylor, 1998; Williams, 2000). For example, Hoggett (2000, 2001) argues that conventional definitions of agency overlook impulsive and non-reflexive actions. His approach is rooted in a non-unitary model of the self and foregrounds the unintentional, emotional and/or unconscious aspects of choice and behaviour. Crucially, Hoggett (2001: 52) is making the argument not simply that actions have unintended consequences, but that ‘actions themselves’ may be unintended because some parts of ourselves may be unfamiliar to us. He develops this argument with Frost (Frost and Hoggett, 2008), drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of ‘melancholic agency’ to make sense of how unacknowledged suffering finds expression in unreflexive action because hurt and loss that cannot be named cannot be worked through. Without attention to the more impulsive and tragic dimensions of agency, Hoggett argues, we end up with naively optimistic accounts of the resilient and resistant capacities of people living in poverty.

While acknowledging how contemporary welfare research contributes to understanding the complexities and contradictions of lived experience, psychosocially informed work has problematised the conceptual baggage that welfare researchers bring to their interpretations. Drawing on this body of research, Dobson (2015) argues that empirical welfare research still tends to assume an overly rational model of agency in which social structures ‘bear down on’ individuals and social groups who in turn ‘act back on’ social structures (Dobson, 2015: 688, 694). She echoes Hunter, who insists on the need to interrogate ‘why certain identifications become the basis for agency other than where agency is perceived as a reactive condition of oppression’ (Hunter, 2003: 338, emphasis added). Like Dobson in her footsteps, Hunter aims to complicate negative and asocial understandings of policy makers as acting in their own interest and that of the state. However, both authors more broadly trouble the reactive orientation of welfare scholarship that takes agency in the face of subordination as its point of departure.

I would suggest that this reactive orientation underlies much of the literature on getting by on welfare payments. The capacity of people in hardship to shape their own lives is often framed as a reaction to adversity – focusing on how people manage, manoeuvre or manipulate constraining situations. In another context, Ortner (2001) has argued that the analytic emphasis on ‘reactive’ forms of accommodation and refusal creates an imbalance, so that any view of the lives of the subordinate outside of their relationship with the dominant is eclipsed. Writing about the context of colonialism, she distinguishes between two different forms of agency oriented on the one hand to power and, on the other hand, to intentionality. The first concerns relations of domination and resistance, whereby agency is ‘reactive to power’ and involves the power to ‘rethink, reframe, and reshape’ within imposed structures (Ortner, 2001: 80). Ortner (2001: 79) argues for greater attention to what she calls ‘an agency of intentions – of projects, purposes, and desires’. By this she means the ‘projects that infuse life with meaning and purpose’, which people pursue ‘within a framework of their own terms, their own categories of value’ (Ortner, 2001: 80). While Ortner’s insights are based on colonialism and do not translate seamlessly to the context of Anglo welfare states, her intervention still encourages researchers to reflect on what is missed when we prioritise the responsive capacities of people in situations of relative powerlessness.

Welfare recipients more often figure as adept responders than pursuers of a liveable life in accounts of getting by. Of course, the reality of dealing with difficult circumstances and carving out a meaningful existence are inseparable in everyday life, and some of the literature shows this. People find not just relief but also purpose amid the pain of their daily struggle. Embedded accounts of getting by like McKenzie’s (2015) provide insight into the values and valuing of working-class culture that sustain life even in hardship. But the dominant concern with resilience and resistance in the literature still tends to foreground the responsive capacities embedded in relationships, identity and belonging, which can submerge their generative aspects. This makes sense in policy-oriented research that seeks to understand how people respond to threats to their welfare and how the architecture of informal and formal social support affects their capacity to do so. However, it crowds out a view of how means of getting by may also be more than that; even channels of satisfaction, desire, and accomplishment.

Methodology

This article arises from a doctoral study of culturally diverse experiences and expectations of the welfare state. The study focused on mundane yet power-laden encounters of everyday life to draw out the cultural frames and practices that animate perceptions and experiences of welfare provision. Formal interviews were combined with ethnographic fieldwork, both conducted over two years in 2014–2015 in a Sydney suburb known for its concentration of ethnic diversity and socio-economic disadvantage.

I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 25 welfare users from Lebanese, Pakistani, Chinese, Aboriginal and Anglo backgrounds. These groups were purposively selected to include more established and emergent migrant populations and to reflect the character of diversity arising from Australia’s settler-colonial and immigration history. Participants ranged from those who relied exclusively on income support payments to those who combined paid work and income support to get by. I spoke to seven men and 18 women primarily of working age between 20 and 64, except for three aged pensioners. The majority of people I interviewed were parents of younger children. Interviews lasted between 45 minutes and three hours, averaging about 90 minutes. The interviews elicited information about networks and practices of support, experiences of social security and support services, and perceptions of duty and responsibility in the family, community, national and transnational spheres.

Initial recruitment was primarily with the help of community welfare organisations and snowballing from there. While interviews were confined to people proficient in English, information sheets were made available in the native languages of target groups to ensure informed consent. Some people who had already been interviewed and with whom I had developed rapport were invited to participate further by having me accompany them while they carried out aspects of their routines, such as running errands or attending community activities. Ethnography is challenging in a diverse suburban context and a fragmented welfare landscape as it complicates ‘ideals of “immersion” and “wholeness”’ (Berg and Sigona, 2013: 347). This meant a degree of opportunism shaped my research and in the end the spread and depth of engagement with people from the targeted categories was varied and uneven. I spent more time with some people than others, seeing some regularly at family support programmes run by local community organisations and observing a few as they ran errands or invited me to their homes.

Intimacy with those involved in research is both a strength and dilemma of in-depth qualitative approaches. In-depth and open-ended methods are more ‘attuned’ to the voices and perspectives of research participants, which is important in research about categories of people that are objectified yet marginalised in dominant discourse (Liamputtong, 2007: 7–9). But intimacy may also lead to over-disclosure and what researchers see as ‘good data’ may leave research participants feeling exposed, particularly when welfare users are culturally disparaged as burdensome and failed citizens (Sinding and Aronson, 2003: 109). I navigated the tensions of intimacy by trying to be sensitive to cues of tone and silence that told me topics were off-limits, as well as approaching sensitive or probing questions ‘tentatively’ and providing ‘ready exits’ to respondents (Sinding and Aronson, 2003: 109). I also approached consent as an ongoing process, asking for verbal consent at the outset and checking in again as the research unfolded and neared completion. I have fictionalised names and altered some descriptive details to protect the anonymity of participants. The project had university ethics clearance.

I generated the findings for this article by manually thematising interview transcripts and field notes. I began by inductively coding for activity and language associated with managing life on welfare, as well as personal and practical challenges and successes. Initial codes were refined to account for the orientation and motivation of ways of getting by, drawing on existing concepts to reflect on their scale and purpose. Notes about the emotional response and tone of interviewees were included in the margins of transcripts to ensure the affective dimensions of interviews were not abstracted out of excerpts. I re-listened to the audio recordings a number of times to maintain a contextualised and holistic perspective of individual accounts.

The motives and approach of the research are inevitably tied to my own experiences of growing up in a ‘welfare dependent’ white family and social network unsettled by addiction, gambling, and violence, but likewise characterised by intimacy, camaraderie and love. The diversity of backgrounds and experiences the study foregrounds thwarts any simplistic identification with the people involved in the research. However, my personal experience has made me sensitive to ambiguity and contradiction; determined, as Tuck (2009) would have it, to neither turn away from the damage expressed in people’s stories nor reduce their stories to damage. Despite these intentions, research on marginalised groups can result in studies that are unintentionally voyeuristic. This is particularly concerning in a context in which ‘activation’ policies surveil the everyday lives of welfare users and target their mundane behaviours. Any attempt to unsettle academic and policy constructions of ‘disadvantaged lives’ must therefore be explicit about the power involved in different ways of looking.

Everyday Care and Accomplishment

Getting by is, by definition, geared towards dealing with a situation where something is lacking. But ways of getting by can also be more than a means to an end. As Holmes (2019) has argued of thrift, it is not reducible to austerity driven consumption, but rather is animated by multiple and overlapping motivations that include financial necessity, conscience and enjoyment. Similarly, framing ‘getting by’ as merely a practical response to a difficult situation does not do justice to the multiple forms of value embedded in ways of dealing with adversity. Paying attention to the multiple motivations that ways of getting by embody casts light on the (re)generative agency they may express.

Certain examples people gave me of managing on a limited income or participating in support were both understated yet spoken about with sometimes-subtle affection, enthusiasm or pride. It was precisely the understated significance of these examples, and how they fitted with conventional framings of active welfare users, that interested me. The following sections focus on the care and accomplishment expressed in the most banal and the more unexpected practices that I heard about or witnessed.

Living, Not Just Surviving

In her award-winning essay on doing it tough in the ‘Black Belt’, Goorie ¹ author Lucashenko (2013) asks not just ‘How do single mothers get by on current levels of welfare?’ but also ‘What dreams are possible for the Brisbane underclass in 2013?’ The ‘Black Belt’ is how Aboriginal people refer to the ‘geographical-cum-cultural entity’ stretching across greater Brisbane, where ‘the Aboriginal underclass has historically concentrated’ and live alongside poor whites in clusters of public housing. Lucashenko’s essay is notable not only for its searing and explicit account of life in poverty, told from the perspective of an insider. It is also one of the few pieces of non-fiction in which the Indigenous and refugee experience is woven seamlessly into the story of getting by on welfare. Lucashenko brings to life the quiet hope that sustains people amid grinding hardship and severe violence rooted in trauma and racism. Selma, a refugee from Yugoslavia and mother to four Aboriginal boys, is one of the three women whose story she tells. As Lucashenko describes it, when Selma spoke of her dreams for the future, ‘her voice lacked certainty, and was almost wistful, in sharp contrast to when she speaks of what she has survived’. More tangible for Selma was going hungry so her boys would not and the strength she drew from mothering them.

Lucashenko evokes how more expansive aspirations are curtailed by the material and symbolic burden of poverty. Recognising the generative dimension of getting by must not obscure how one’s ‘pleasures, pursuits, and projects’ (Ortner, 2001: 79) are hampered when energy and resources are absorbed in hanging on. Nor should it imply that people ought to show flair and ingenuity in surviving hardship. Not only might that romanticise agency as necessarily positive and constructive, it also risks characterising people who struggle to cope as incompetent or blameworthy (Lister, 2004: 125). More simply, it ignores the painful and painstaking work that getting by can entail. While not everyone I spoke to was familiar with the kind of enduring and endemic hardship that Lucashenko describes, many were (see Mitchell, 2020). Nessa articulated the idea of getting by as scraping through: ‘[You’re] just living so basic; you’re just surviving.’ Excelling at survival is likely to offer little comfort to those barely getting by and worn down by the effort.

With these caveats in mind, this article contributes to the literature on lived experiences of welfare by focusing on the moments that make life liveable when the immediacy of getting by is more solid than dreams of the future. As a counterpoint to emphasis on the responsive capacities of welfare recipients, I have foregrounded their generative capacity for projects, pursuits and pleasures that nourish and sustain life even in hardship. Generative capacities evoke a hopeful orientation but not necessarily of a grand scale. The focus on minute and muted examples of everyday care and accomplishment is perhaps all the more pertinent given the limited resources at the disposal of people focused on getting by. Greg’s lifted gifts exemplify this point – they enable him to affirm his familial relationships through a gift economy that impoverishment would otherwise exclude him from. The tokens of luxury are relished because they are beyond the means of his family’s meagre income.

However, these ways of getting by may not resemble the ‘resources’ or ‘assets’ policy makers and researchers are looking for. Neither Dylan nor Greg’s habits of shoplifting or scrounging at the rubbish dump would likely be considered responsible or constructive by conventional definitions. Scrounging offered little in the way of financial pay-off for Dylan, yet it afforded him a sense of independence and satisfaction, not to mention a welcome distraction. Greg’s shoplifting was perhaps more lucrative, but the real reward was the thrill of pulling one over the corporate supermarket, the pleasure of collecting and the ability to express his affection for his family. While occasionally such schemes may deliver material reward – some extra cash or treats that would otherwise have to be forgone – their value exceeds any practical function and sits uncomfortably with a purely instrumental account of getting by.

The less sensational ways of ‘being there’ for family and friends – the mundane gestures and exchanges; the sharing of time and company – may register more readily as strengthening assets if they were not so ‘ephemeral’ and difficult to observe (Andres and Round, 2015: 677). Intimate and informal examples of ‘being there’ may seem inconsequential at first glance, but they can nourish the relationships that are drawn on in hard times, as well as constituting moments of pleasure and purpose in their own right. While ‘being there’ is intimate and informal, it also occurs in semi-formal spaces enabled by state investment. Chopping the fruit was Reem’s way of expressing her commitment to the supported playgroup that had been there for her in the absence of support from her own fractured family. Reem wanted a family that would ‘be there for each other’, but she felt ‘if anything [she got] more pressure and stress’. As Harrison (2012: 106) cautions, there is a tendency in resilience research to ‘see’ those who are connected to support networks and overlook those who are much less able to draw on them.

As Indigenous health scholars have made clear, whether generative capacities are considered productive assets depends on who is looking and what they expect to find (Brough et al., 2004; Walter et al., 2017). Culturally distinctive ways of life have figured as both a strength to be harnessed and weakness to be targeted in recent policy formulations of Indigenous disadvantage (Altman, 2011). Working towards a ‘culturally and contextually embedded understanding of resilience’, Ungar (2008: 222) points out that such an approach ‘might reasonably be expected to challenge what is accepted as good outcomes and normative behaviour’. These perspectives insist that resilience is shaped by the contexts in which it is enacted, which includes how culturally distinctive ways of life are valued or denigrated in political, policy and media rhetoric.

This returns me to my initial claim that the generative dimensions of getting by are submerged in the responsive orientation of much welfare literature. It is not that generative capacities are missing, but rather that they are framed as a response to threats to welfare, which indeed they can be. This is where Ortner’s distinction between reactive and project agency – which is analytical and not empirical – should not be overstated. She acknowledges that reactive practices can be empowering and self-affirming (Ortner, 2001: 81). The supported Aboriginal social group, which was facilitated by the community development arm of a welfare organisation, epitomised a responsive welfare orientation and the projective investment in black community and identity. However, what outsiders recognised as cultural strength – for example, the visible culturally themed activities that excited funders – did not necessarily align with the more subtle commitment to black sociality that participants described in simply coming together to catch up and share a cuppa.

The purpose embedded in the practices I have described may not always resemble ‘the agency of intentions’ Ortner identifies. Ortner’s framework is perhaps most obviously applicable to Indigenous ways of getting by within settler-colonial welfare systems. Moreover, conceptualising everyday care as social repair implies routine and habit – which still requires effort and selectivity on the part of actors – more so than the imagination and aspiration that ‘projective agency’ signals (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 984). Yet such practices are (re)generative in both an everyday sense of enriching life and the sociological sense of bringing about and sustaining sociality. Finally, following Hoggett (2001), we can point to more impulsive and compulsive desires and pursuits that give life meaning. Making room for this point requires a non-rationalist model of agency that can comprehend how the subject ‘engages earnestly in projects for reasons which it entirely misunderstands’ (Hoggett, 2000: 172). Whether or not they conform to Ortner’s ‘agency of intentions’, I have argued that if we look closely enough and without judgement, projects, pursuits and pleasures that make life liveable are discernible – however muted or modest – in practices of getting by.

Conclusion

The concepts and theories we draw on and produce in our research animate and delimit our telling of sociological stories. The emphasis on individual agency in social theory over the last three decades has been hugely influential in shaping sociological descriptions and explanations of social life, not least in the study of welfare and poverty. The concept of agency is so ubiquitous it has become somewhat of a blunt instrument, mired in questions of its presence or absence in lived lives and – even more fraught – researchers’ accounts of them (Dahl, 2009). Interrogating the kinds of stories that conceptualising agency invites therefore has broader sociological significance beyond the study of living on welfare payments.

Drawing on efforts to refine the conceptualisation of agency from within and beyond welfare scholarship, this article excavates the generative capacities that are buried within the dominant coping and resilience framework of welfare research. The article contributes to the theorisation of lived experiences of welfare by drawing attention to the scale and orientation of ways of getting by that embody more than making ends meet. I have foregrounded the understated pursuits and pleasures that people enjoy in their everyday effort to make do, arguing that these practices express more than the reactive agency that tends to be prioritised in accounts of surviving on welfare. Perhaps I would have passed over them if I were not looking for a positive angle that spoke to more than the hardship people endure. But the modesty of these practices and the meaning they imbue to everyday life seem to speak to circumstances in which the demands of the present are more tangible than a vision of the future.

This article evokes a hopeful and pragmatic outlook but is also sensitive to the politics of prioritising agency in contemporary social policy practice and research. As Bonner-Thompson and McDowell (2020: 2) articulate in relation to care, appreciating power relations is critical to understanding how ways of getting by – and, I would add, the lenses through which we see them – are shaped by the cultural and political contexts in which they are engendered. Foregrounding the actions of people on public income support – even if prioritising flashes of hope – is loaded in a context in which their agency is already politicised and fetishised as the object of policy. At the same time, nuanced and human accounts are necessary to pierce through over-determining narratives of disadvantaged lives. Doing justice to lived lives requires inviting people to speak more than their pain (Tuck, 2009: 413, following bell hooks). In this article, that has involved walking the sometimes-fine line between acknowledging and romanticising the agency embedded in getting by.