"Universal Data Elements," or the Biopolitical Life of Homeless Populations

This article explores the development of the Homeless Management Information Systems program by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Launched in 2001, the program mandates data collection by homeless social service agencies receiving federal funds. The program is examined in terms of broader responses to the "electronic turn" in social work. The generative capacities of database management systems are understood as producing surveillance at a register other than the individual subject often presumed in political theories of social control as well as surveillance studies of information technologies. The article argues that we must move toward an understanding of homeless management as a biopolitical enterprise, rather than only a disciplinary one. A discussion of how the HMIS program produces a homeless population as an object of knowledge and plane of intervention provides an understanding of the significance of HMIS for homelessness in the U.S. as well as for surveillance studies more broadly.