ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on interviews conducted between social workers and youth in care bridges both the practical and mundane practices of the participants as well as their self-referential accounting practices for connecting this moment to formal, organisational, and institutionalised social relations. It suggests that the process of writing and erasing youths' stories is achieved not just in the moments of an interview, but in the concrete forms for accomplishing an interview as such. The chapter argues that the interview is itself but a moment inside extended social relations. Social workers must not act as if their activities of arranging interviews, writing case notes, and identifying the points for analysis are incidental to the facts. Troubles in interviews develop precisely because clients are often unable to recover the theoretical and discursive forms that social workers rely on to conduct interviews.
