Homeless Youth Managing Relationships

Abstract

This article details the ways in which young people experiencing homelessness are managing their relationships. Beck’s individualization thesis is used to relate young people’s relationships to social structures and to discourses of homelessness, addressing a tendency in the literature to focus on micro social encounters at the expense of structural processes. Data from qualitative interviews with 20 young people experiencing homelessness in Melbourne, Australia, are analyzed to describe the process of reflexive intersubjectivity as part of the active negotiation of structural inequality. This approach provides insight into the diversity of strat-egies used by young people experiencing homelessness. Three patterns of reflexive intersubjectivity are described: choosing independence, making family, and the process of making home. These are analyzed in terms of the way they reflect the struc-tural and discursive environment of youth homelessness. The article concludes with theoretical reflections on the relationship between homelessness, intersubjectivity and inequality.