“I don’t know how to explain it”, Caro told me in an interview, “but you develop a sense [Gespür] for when you can keep standing in front of the person, because you know: Okay, they are going to shout at you for ten minutes, and then they have used the valve that they needed. And then there are situations where you feel: Okay, I better take a step back, because it might not stay like that.”
Caro was working in one of several emergency shelters in which I observed, participated in daily tasks, and interviewed staff members as part of an ethnographic study on de-escalation practices in German health and welfare services. De-escalation is a common answer in health and welfare facilities to the question of how staff should react to aggressive behavior in a professional setting. My research project asks how de-escalation is promoted as a workplace safety measure, how it is learned and taught in de-escalation training, and how it is practiced on the ground – specifically in overnight emergency shelters for unhoused people in Berlin.
A remarkable aspect of de-escalation, especially in the context of health and welfare settings, is that it approaches aggression at a conflux of care and security practices. Many of my interlocutors, staff members in shelters and de-escalation trainers alike, understood aggression in health and welfare contexts as both potentially dangerous and as a stress response in need of caring intervention. This understanding appears even in the minute sensitivities, such as the awareness of interpersonal space, that Caro brought to situations with palpable tension: she considered both the potential needs of the other person to express frustration and the risk of the argument turning physical. For Caro as for other staff members, sensing aggression in the shelter environment was an integral part of their job. At the same time, their daily work was not in fact defined as security work, but revolved around issues such as organizing food, clothing, and access to places to sleep. In this blog post, I trace how aggression is sensed in the shelters to show how the sensing of in/security is entangled with institutional care and welfare provision.
Security, following Laufenberg and Thompson (2022) and the long line of feminist, anti-racist and abolitionist thinkers they draw on, is a powerful and expansive formation of governance, deeply intertwined with capitalist modes of producing crisis and insecurity. A critical analysis of security asks what versions of security and safety are being produced, whose safety is prioritized, and who is constructed as a threat. Such questions are integral to studying how aggression is sensed and encountered, given the uneven attribution of aggression in conjunction with the production of gendered, racialized, classed and dis/abled difference (Longino 2013; Metzl 2011; Rollins 2021; Chen 2023). In the context of health and social welfare services, the production of difference in relation to aggression is also enmeshed with the apprehension and management of aggression in institutional spaces, especially those designated for particular populations, such as homeless people. Tracing how emergency shelter staff senses aggression can help articulate how aggression is present in institutional spaces, and how it is apprehended in caring and securitizing registers.
A Situated Sensorium for Aggression
The shelters in my research formed part of a perpetually precarious and semi-professional emergency service meant to protect people from cold-related harm at night. They were usually sought out by people who could not access housing and were excluded from or rendered precarious within Germany’s regular social support system. Winter emergency shelters require people to eat and sleep in shared, crowded and regulated spaces that are usually only open during the winter months and during the night. Responsible for enforcing the rules of shelter space, shelter staff were also tasked with keeping the space “free of violence”. This entailed intervening in case of conflict and asking people who were violent to leave the premises. In many shelters, this was done in cooperation with externally hired security staff. In this context, many staff members told me that they were attentive to loud voices to detect a potentially escalating situation. Susanne shared:
When I sit in the office for example, or also at night when I sleep there, then I always listen a lot to what is happening. So I hear when people are having a conversation, and I really pay attention to whether someone is raising their voice, and then I always have to wait whether that is part of the conversation, because someone is telling a story, or whether that is because a conflict is happening.
Aggression, in other words, was not simply heard, it was actively listened for. This active sensing was not practiced in isolation, but in a particular spatial arrangement and within an institutional context where staff could not be everywhere all at once yet bore responsibility to intervene when someone showed aggressive behavior. Sensing aggression, this example shows, is a matter of practice, to be distinguished from the idea of sensing as a passive perception of a given object which comes to the senses. While people in my research certainly had different sensitivities and attunements to aggression, there were commonalities as well, shaped by institutional roles– one could call it a situated sensorium. Notably, as with the sensitivity for raised voices, this sensing of aggression amidst everyday interactions such as a loud conversation also constituted a form of low-tech surveillance in the shelters.
Sensing Stress, Constituting Risk
A situated sensorium encompasses multiple sensitivities, for sounds, touch, embodied states, and institutional routines and atmospheres. Another staff member, when I asked if escalating situations could be sensed beforehand, explained:
Yes, when an argument blows up a bit, then you can hear from the kitchen that it’s somehow getting louder in the eating area, then yes. Of course adrenaline enters into it as well: “Oh God, I’ll go check what is going on there.”
As “adrenaline enters into it”, this staff member’s description introduces a sense of her own embodied response. The sensorial repertoire of sensing aggression in the shelter importantly included such interoceptive sensitivities. Adrenaline was one shorthand way of describing physical sensations of stress (Roberts 2024) to be sensed in oneself, but potentially also in others. Interestingly, adrenaline itself is given agency in this description, causing an impulse to go and check out what the noise is about. Several staff members explained how being aware of their own stress was important for them to be effective de-escalators, and de-escalation training would usually sensitize participants to the signs that they themselves were under stress.
But even more central to staff members was the stress of others. They often described having an awareness for people’s moods as well as for more general atmospheres. They sensed risks of aggression in long waiting times in cold weather, cramped spaces, interrupted sleep, and the small violences of what Goffman has aptly called “batch living” (Goffman 1961 [2022], 10) remarking that certain experiences would make them angry and impatient, too. This sensitivity, I would argue, renders aggression palpable as material-semiotically constituted risk in the institutional space of the shelters, not simply monitored and managed, but also related to vital needs such as sleep, warmth and dignity.
Dis/orienting Gut Feelings
Another register of interoceptive sensing within staff’s situated sensorium, and one I encountered frequently in my research, was gut feeling. Like adrenaline and stress, gut feeling presents as an internal sensation, metaphorically sitting in the pit of the stomach. Akin to the sense [Gespür] that Caro described, gut feeling and related notions were used by research participants to describe modes of knowing that, being grounded in experience and context, resisted articulation in general terms. In the realm of police work, the use of neurobiological discourse (Keesman 2022), as well as reliance on experiential knowledge (Abdul-Rahman et al. 2020, 34) has been critically analyzed as to how it can function as a refusal of articulation and accountability (see also Elbek 2025). In my research, where staff had markedly different mandates and powers, gut feeling served to denote a sense of being oriented and secure in one’s fast and intuitive assessments. In this vein, for example, several staff members explained that they would tell new colleagues to rely on and follow their gut feeling, especially to sense whether a situation was dangerous.
For me as a researcher, gut feeling became especially tangible when I noticed my own senses of in/security morph and shift throughout my research. This happened for example when I moved from a small shelter where I had previously worked to larger shelters with more security staff, or when I noticed myself grow impractically sensitive to the risk of aggression after participant observation in a great number of de-escalation training sessions. Having prior work experience in a shelter, these small disorientations made me aware of how much I did rely in practice on a well-working gut feeling, but they also gave me an embodied notion of how senses of in/security are grounded in specific social arrangements.
Entanglements of Care and Security
Importantly, within the context of the shelter environment, as well as in de-escalation training, I also came across registers of sensing in/security that were not oriented towards sensing danger. When I asked Britta about whether escalating situations announced themselves beforehand, our conversation turned to food:
When [people] know good food is coming, they are looking forward to it. But when it’s announced that there is rice…or couscous…! (Laughter). We are not friends anymore then. […] The first time in my life, I was homesick because I was on a trip and the food was bad […] One time, I was frying onions for dinner, really a lot of onions. And onions always smell so incredibly delicious. And then, [X] came in, and said: (sniffing the air) Home, sweet Home. Polska. Or something like it, he signaled that it smells like home […] And that’s a good feeling, because I think everyone knows this, some smells are just familiar and the smell of fried onions brings humanity together. (Laughter)
Throughout my research, I came not only across sensitivities towards danger and risk, but also encountered sensitivities to smells, tastes, or touch, that feel safe or give a sense of home, connection or pleasure. Including such sensitivities in a sensorium for in/security sheds light on entanglements of care and security while also opening possibilities of thinking security beyond efforts of securitization and surveillance. Laufenberg and Thompson describe how abolitionist and care-ethical criticisms of contemporary security regimes attempt to redefine security: “In this vein, not more carceral security – and hence more police, more punishment, more surveillance and more sealing of borders – is the appropriate answer to (social) insecurity, but more care – and thus more resonance, connection, and responsivity, more care, responsibility and solidarity.” (Laufenberg and Thompson 2022, 32, my translation).
What, against this backdrop, does it mean to grow sensitive to loud voices, to prize gut feeling, sense adrenaline, and smell the fried onions?
For one, attending to staff’s situated sensorium for aggression in the shelters highlights the ambivalences and confluences of care and security within the asymmetrical power relations of institutional encounters. It shows subtle ways in which policing and securitization is present in spaces of care or welfare provision. At the same time, I suggest, this sensorium can be read as reaching – without being able to transcend its institutional context – for ways of feeling safe beyond carceral security.
Maja Sisnowski is a PhD candidate with the Health, Care and the Body research group at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests move in the fields of feminist science and technology studies, critical disability studies, care and security.
References
Abdul-Rahman, Laila; Espín Grau, Hannah; Klaus, Luise and Tobias Singelnstein. 2020: Rassismus und Diskriminierungserfahrungen im Kontext polizeilicher Gewaltausübung. Zweiter Zwischenbericht zum Forschungsprojekt „Körperverletzung im Amt durch Poli-zeibeamt*innen“ (KviAPol). Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 11.11.2020, https://kviapol.rub.de.
Chen, Mel Y. 2023. Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire. Anima: Critical Race Studies Otherwise. Durham: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9781478027447.
Elbek, Laust Lund. 2025. “Sniffing Out Trouble? What and How The ‘Police Nose’ Smells.” FocaalBlog, December 24 https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/laust-lund-elbek-sniffing-out-trouble-what-and-how-the-police-nose-smells/
Goffman, Erving. 1961 [2022]. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Penguin Modern Classics. Penguin Books.
Keesman, Laura Danique. 2022. “Primordial Brains and Bodies: How Neurobiological Discourses Shape Policing Experiences.” Body & Society 28 (4): 80–105. doi:10.1177/1357034X221134440.
Laufenberg, Mike, and Vanessa Eileen Thompson, eds. 2022. Sicherheit: rassismuskritische und feministische Beiträge. 1. Auflage. Forum Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Band 49. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.
Longino, Helen E. 2013. Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Metzl, Jonathan Michel. 2011. The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease. Boston, Mass: Beacon.
Roberts, Celia. 2024. “Adrenaline.” In Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary, edited by Andrea Ford, Roslyn Malcom, Sonja Erikainen, Lisa Raeder, and Celia Roberts, 15–23. Bloomsbury UK.
Rollins, Oliver. 2021. Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Cite as: Sisnowski, M. 2025. “Gut Feeling, Adrenaline and Fried Onions: Sensing Aggression in German Health and Welfare Services” Focaalblog January 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/01/23/maja-sisnowski-gut-feeling-adrenaline-and-fried-onions-sensing-aggression-in-german-health-and-welfare-services/
