Abstract

This article examines the ethical tensions of affective solidarity in street-level encounters between volunteers and homeless individuals, foregrounding the role of space and materiality in shaping ethical relationality. Drawing on an ethnography of solidarity practices in Lyon, France, we analyse how embodied, affective, spatial, and material entanglements configure everyday outreach and distribution activities. We identify three interrelated forms of going-towards—exposing, engaging, and situating—through which volunteers encounter homeless individuals in the street. Our findings show that going-towards is ethically ambivalent. While it enables relational openness by mobilizing bodies, objects, and spatial arrangements, it also exposes volunteers to vulnerability and may reproduce asymmetries inherent in helper–helped relations. We argue that ethical solidarity does not rest on eliminating these asymmetries, but on their continuous negotiation through embodied and spatio-material practices. The article contributes to research on affective solidarity and embodied ethics by introducing the notion of an ethics of going-towards and by conceptualizing spatial dissonance to show how the street acts as a medium of ethical encounter.