Inside out – Views on and from home by people with experience of homelessness

Abstract

This visual essay explores what home means from the perspective of people who have experienced homelessness. Through their photography, we trace the dynamic interplay of inside and outside, presence and absence, materiality and immateriality in the multilayered meaning-making around home. Part of on an ethnographic project undertaken in 2022 in Southeast Queensland, 14 participants who had experienced homelessness were asked to take photographs and discuss them during a follow-up interview. The captioned photographs mediate our gaze on and from home, revealing the affordances of home as a material and immaterial construct. In the participants' visual storytelling we move across different forms of accommodation, making tangible the sense of housing instability and uncertainty they face in their daily lives. Based on the premise that the experience of being made home-less significantly and enduringly inflects one's relationship with home, their photography provides unique and valuable insights into what home means within the contemporary socio-historical context marked by escalating housing and cost of living crises. In doing so, we position this visual essay within housing activism and scholarship approaching home in terms of place and relational practice, rather than an asset, foregrounding how these understandings coalesce in home as a feeling.