Conclusion: The Symbolic Economy of Youth Homelessness and the Purpose of Homelessness Research

Abstract

Youth homelessness is a both an evocative manifestation of contemporary poverty, and an important site for theorising the relationship between inequalities and young subjectivities in late modernity. In the preceding chapters, this book has explored youth homelessness as a form of material inequality, a system of moral and symbolic hierarchies, and a lived experience which creates new identities, tactile sensations, affective experiences and intersubjective processes. Telling stories about their experiences of homelessness and the process of making a home, young people have described their ideas about homelessness, their relationship to themselves, their sensuous embodied experiences and their relationships with others, all forged in a context of profound material deprivation and stigmatisation. By way of conclusion, this chapter summarises the key findings and conceptual arguments of the preceding chapters and pushes the theoretical implications of the analysis further in relation to key problems in the contemporary study of young lives.