Homelessness Felt

Catherine Robinson

doi:10.5130/csr.v15i1.2060

Abstract

The felt—as both methodology and experiential terrain—remains under-explored and under-theorised in research on homelessness. This experimental piece traces the multi-sensory engagement of ethnographic and biographic fieldwork undertaken for separate projects with homeless people in two capital cities on Australia’s east coast. The epistemological contributions and emotional dimensions of seeing, tasting, touching, smelling and listening are explored. Through a series of short ‘felt’ reflections, consideration of the critical role of corporeality in coming to know and inscribe the experiences of others is prompted. The feeling, researching body is posited as central to new, productive and holistic intertwinings with felt-experience and the mixed trajectories of grief, humour, violence and trauma that often characterise persistent homelessness are made vivid.

Highlights

My fieldwork was fraught with such invasions of privacy, such scenic exposure to the everyday rituals of sleeping, eating, washing, to the everyday bodily intimacies of lives lived hard in the generalised spaces of park edges, backstreets, drop-in centres and refuges
I got to know the angular shapes of the rough sleeping blokes, their skin sighing away from their unshaven cheek bones with too much cask, their walking stiff and slow from joints familiar with concrete, their hair manky and clumped
I listened to this girl in the interview room dusk matching up her injured body with the multiple assaults, with being pushed from a balcony, with being put through the front windscreen of a car

Summary

Introduction

My fieldwork was fraught with such invasions of privacy, such scenic exposure to the everyday rituals of sleeping, eating, washing, to the everyday bodily intimacies of lives lived hard in the generalised spaces of park edges, backstreets, drop-in centres and refuges. It was the clumps of dark hair on the gym-turned-drop-in-centre floor which did me in though—I didn’t faint, but I went home with my stomach lodged in the back of my throat and my bum muscles clamped.

Results

Conclusion