Of Nomads and Vagrants: Single Homelessness and Narratives of Home as Place

Abstract

Within a growing and varied body of work exploring homeless people's own understandings and experiences of homelessness, increased attention has begun to focus upon the varying understandings of ‘home’ held by those who are currently ‘home-less’. Most such work has been concerned with an examination of people's experiences of ‘home as residence’, with far less attention paid to homeless people's understandings of what might be termed ‘home as place’. Given the extent to which homelessness continues to be constructed as an experience intimately if not inevitably associated with the experience of movement, such an omission is surprising. As homeless people move within, between, and through places—sometimes by necessity, sometimes by ‘choice’—such movements are liable to have a significant impact upon a person's sense of home as well as upon his or her experience of homelessness. The author examines understandings of home as place articulated by single homeless men living in night shelter and hostel accommodation in a large town on the south coast of England. Drawing upon a reconstructive life-history approach, the author sets the understandings of each respondent within the context of the mobility which has characterised that respondent's homeless career. In attempting to make sense of respondents’ experiences, four contrasting narratives of home as place are outlined, relating to the experiences of the ‘(dis)placed’, the ‘homesick’, those whose lives now move around a ‘spectral geography’, and of the ‘new nomads’.