Discourses Of Homelessness Research Articles

Ho‘ailona

This article asks what it means for conservation scientists to label a member of an endangered, endemic species homeless. By considering the boundary-crossing figure of Ho‘ailona, a partially blind Hawaiian monk seal who was declared homeless and translocated six times between 2008 and 2009, the article argues that the language of home points to the ongoing operations of colonialism in Western conservation. Reading the discourse of homelessness offers a methodology for tracing the histories and manifestations of colonial logics as they circulate in conservation science. At the same time, the article considers how Kānaka Maoli articulated a contrapuntal claim to home that positioned Ho‘ailona as belonging in his natal waters and among a multispecies community of caregivers. Bringing together critical homelessness studies and settler colonial studies, the essay examines how settler societies and institutions use endangered marine species to make specific claims to home and, by extension, erase Indigenous claims to place.

Language in motion in Marilynne Robinson’s "Housekeeping" and the Book of "Ruth"

The terminology used to describe people living in socially or legally ambiguous housing conditions is contradictory and contested in often unpredictable ways. Homeless people, as well as the laws and government discourses designed to limit their behavior, frequently choose language that is at odds with what their bodies are actually doing in the spaces they occupy. In this essay I will discuss the oxymoronic verbal formulations for how transients, especially transient women, move through and live in social space by looking at two texts that focus on homeless women and their social power, Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, and the biblical Book of Ruth (on which it is partially based). By placing these works in the context of the legal discourses of homelessness and squatting, and gender analyses of mobility, I hope to identify a mode of gendered embodiment based in the language of motion.

Constructing a Policy Field Aimed at Homelessness: How Epistemic Communities Shape Discourse

ABSTRACT This paper explores the formation of the discourse that structures policies aimed at reducing homelessness in Norway. It discusses how experts interacting within epistemic communities contribute to the shaping of discourse, and how research is used to constitute the interpretation of the situation as homeless. The findings indicate that the discourse of homelessness has developed within an epistemic community, acknowledging a naturalistic definition and a structural explanation of homelessness, a community in which both researchers and policy makers have participated. The discourse is also marked by the dominant influence of international research on homelessness, rather than a focus on the local situation of people experiencing homelessness in Norway. This raises the question of whether research has mainly been used symbolically in the formative period of the policy field, strengthening the position of housing in social policies, rather than investigating the challenges of persons experiencing homelessness.

Youth, Poetry, and Zines: Rewriting the Streets as Home

This article focuses on an under-examined archive of young adult literature�words and images created by, for, and about street youth. We describe how street-identified youth use poetry and various forms of cultural jamming to engage in social commentary. Drawn from the pages of a street youth zine developed in a western Canadian city, the poems and images analyzed here illustrate the ways the youth writers remix popular cultural materials such as signs, songs and alphabet books to create new scripts about drugs, homelessness, and youth. In this literature of the streets, youth rewrite the discourses of homelessness and create new storylines that critique the way society serves its citizens. We argue that this archive also asks adult readers, critics, and teachers to rethink traditional categories of YA literature to include writings produced by and for underrepresented youth.

Extreme mobilities: Challenging the concept of ‘travel’

This article explores extreme mobilities by analysing how ‘global nomads’ create their lifestyles. The focus is on power negotiations regarding freedom of movement and the limits of modern-day mobilities. The study is based on in-depth interviews, instant ethnography and virtual ethnography analysed with Foucauldian discourse analysis. Two discourses are examined—the discourse of home and hearth and the discourse of homelessness—that reveal contradictions in society and in global nomads’ lifestyles. While societies tend to be suspicious about sustained mobilities, mostly promoting homebound travel, global nomads are not able to detach themselves from home either. They are opportunists taking advantage of societies’ dominant discourses and practices.

Addressing older women's homelessness: service and housing models

There is limited understanding of the nature and extent of older women's homelessness in Australia and how it can be alleviated. The aim of this project is to ascertain the combination of program and housing models that is likely to be most effective in addressing older women's homelessness. The data comprise interviews and correspondence with 14 Australian and international stakeholders. The findings draw on insight from housing, gerontology and gender studies, and highlight the need to match welfare and housing programs with the diverse life experiences and current needs of older women. Alongside flagship models of practice in housing provision are assumptions within housing and homelessness sectors of what older women need. There is a lack of understanding that most older women in housing crisis have limited knowledge of the welfare sector, and with provision of mainstream housing (and community aged care if needed) will live independently. Traditional homelessness programs and specialised supportive housing, associated with both seniors and homelessness sectors, are appropriate for women who have lived with ongoing disruption and substantive health concerns. Addressing older women's homelessness in Australia requires a range of services and housing responses, with increased attention given to a discourse of housing – affordable, secure housing – rather than continued discourse of homelessness.

Against the Unchallenged Discourse of Homelessness: Examining the Views of Early Childhood Preservice Teachers

This study investigated views about children experiencing homelessness held by preservice teachers in an early childhood education program. Thirteen early childhood preservice teachers were actively involved in class discussion, reading, doing class assignments, and visiting homeless shelters as community-based field experience. They were asked to participate in focus groups, and some of them also participated in individual interviews. The analysis showed that the preservice teachers viewed homelessness in a way parallel to public discourse, which neglects and stigmatizes children experiencing homelessness. They believed that those children and families would be abnormal and held stereotypes attached to the spaces they occupied. By connecting these preservice teachers' views to the dominant discourse of homelessness in U.S. society, this study addresses how early childhood educators can support preservice teachers to prepare children experiencing homelessness in their future classrooms.

On the Road: Examining Self‐Representation and Discourses of Homelessness in Young Adult Texts

AbstractIn this article, the authors analyze representations of social issues within contemporary memoirs written for and marketed to a young adult audience and multimodal zines produced by homeless youth. To read across these distinctly different texts (mass marketed and do‐it‐yourself cultural productions) and genres (memoir and zines), the authors introduce “discourse tagging” as a strategy for tracing these self‐representations of homelessness across discreet social locations and contexts. The authors demonstrate how this approach provides a way for teacher educators to engage students in a critical inquiry into the ways in which certain “truths” (i.e. homelessness is the direct result of an individual's choice or personal failing) are represented in texts and how those representations might be resisted or contested in other cultural contexts.

The sounds of silence in educational tracking: a longitudinal, ethnographic case study

Foregrounding the nexuses of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and ethnography, specifically in longitudinal research, I draw on case study data that span the course of 10 years to explore the issues salient to understanding the problem of educational tracking. I focus on the struggle of Vicky Treader, an African-American young woman living in Albany, NY, to obtain a high school diploma while labeled as a special education student. Analytically, I construct the context of Vicky's experiences within the educational system through the discursive details of official and unofficial records and transcripts and against the backdrop of neoliberal education policies that reinforce educational and social inequalities. I traverse 10 years of institutionalized discourses and decision-making through three episodes (1998, 1999, 2005) that represent her experiences within the special education in elementary, middle and high school. Educational tracking, I will argue, relies not only on official records and narratives but also on what Huckin [(2002). Textual silence and the discourse of homelessness. Discourse & Society, 13(3), 347–372] refers to as ‘textual silences’. I demonstrate how using critical discourse analysis within longitudinal ethnography enabled me to connect micro and macro discourses and to understand the long-term consequences of educational decisions and what these might mean for educational equity.

Homeless Youth Managing Relationships

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.

Homelessness Coverage, Social Reality, and Media Ownership: Comparing a National Newspaper with Two Regional Newspapers in Canada

The media plays an important role in the discourse of homelessness. The purpose of this study was to compare how two Alberta newspapers (Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal) and one national newspaper(the Globe and Mail) covered homeless issues in terms of population, main themes, article type, monthly differences, and critical time periods. Through purposive sampling technique, 449 articles from 1987 to 2007 were selected for analysis, including 128 news articles from the Edmonton Journal, 152 from the Calgary Herald and 169 from the Globe and Mail. A content analysis showed that these newspapers have different agenda settings for homelessness related issues. We argue that the differences among the newspapers’ coverage on homelessness are directly related to media ownership, and the unique economic and political structure and ideology at national and provincial levels.

Homelessness as the Unforgiving Minute of the Present: The Rhetorical Tenses of Democratic Citizenship

Popular discourse and advocacy efforts characterize homelessness as a social problem bound by the present-centered concerns of physical affliction and material deprivation. Wayne Powers's documentary film Reversal of Fortune exemplifies this tendency by performing a “social experiment” to investigate how giving a homeless man $100,000 would change his life: the film chronicles the intervention in terms of an ever-fleeting opportunity that the man ultimately fails to utilize. Such discourses deny the future-oriented grounds for identification between homeless and housed as citizens sharing a common political destiny. Discourses of homelessness thus provide an important opportunity for questioning how the rhetorical tenses of democratic citizenship can be cultivated or suppressed, and how such rhetorical work can contribute to a more dynamic democratic culture.

Metaphors in Homelessness Discourse and Research: Exploring “Pathways”, “Careers” and “Safety Nets” 1

Like sociologists who use “class” and “stratification”, and physicists who use “black hole”, researchers who investigate homelessness and housing issues use metaphors. To name just a few, we hear of “sliding” into homelessness, “pathways”, “revolving doors”, “exit points” and homeless and housing “careers”. “Pathways” and “careers” are very popular among researchers and regularly appear in national and international journals, and in the titles of funded research. This paper examines the use of such metaphors in research about homelessness as it is influenced by, and contributes to, the general discourse about its explanation, the alleged characteristics of people who are homeless and how they are expected to change their circumstances. It poses several questions, including: What social function do such metaphors perform? Do they contribute to the discourse of homelessness and, if so, how? What is conveyed about people who are homeless when such figures of speech are used about them and their circumstances? Do the metaphors reflect the stated experience of people who are homeless? The analysis applies the work of George Lakoff who, for at least two decades, has investigated the role of metaphors in such varied circumstances as the Gulf Wars, debates between liberals and conservatives over “family values”, and welfare and social security policy issues in the United States. The paper will also briefly mention the metaphors used in policies such as “Mutual Obligation” in Australia, thus exploring the intersections between unemployment and homelessness discourses. While acknowledging their diverse meanings, and valorizing and acknowledging the necessity of metaphors in any learning, including research, the perspective is advanced that many metaphors are part of a certain way of perceiving and explaining homelessness which are not always neutral. Simultaneously, some metaphors may contradict that part of the research which demonstrates that homelessness has its antecedents in structural factors while reinforcing the dominant discourse which claims that homelessness is a “choice” and the residualist explanations associated with it.

Textual silence and the discourse of homelessness

This article delineates five forms of textual elision or `silence': speech—act silences, presuppositional silences, discreet silences, genre-based silences and manipulative silences. Manipulative silence receives extended attention, as it is felt to be the most ideologically powerful form of silence in public discourse. A case study on the discourse of homelessness, drawing on a corpus of 163 newspaper articles and editorials published in the US during early 1999, is used to illustrate how manipulative silences work and, more importantly, how they can be systematically identified by the discourse analyst. The article concludes with a discussion of the notion of authorial `intentionality'.

Partnership and Policy Networks in Rural Local Governance: Homelessness in Taunton

In this paper we discuss the importance of ‘partnership’ and ‘policy networks’ in the new contemporary governance of rural areas. We use these notions to contextualize the representation of, and policy response to the particular issue of homelessness in the rural service centre of Taunton in Somerset. Here particular partnership networks have been brokered by the local authority which bring together a wide range of business, voluntary and community interests with a stake in the homelessness issue. Strong pre‐existing discourses of homelessness in Taunton characterize the issue as one of a town centre problem of ‘beggars, vagrants and drunks’. We offer evidence from the local press to suggest that these discourses have been persistently peddled by particular interests in the town. New forms of partnership were inevitably embroiled with the pursuit of these existing discourses, and contrary voices were unable to redefine existing social relations within policy networks. The evidence from Taunton suggests that where partnership merely involves attempts to repackage existing resources, it seems unlikely that it will fulfil some of the more optimistic claims for a more pluralist form of governance in the local arena.