Dispatches from the Street

Abstract

This study examines the personal worlds of homeless campers in Tucson, Arizona in the late 1990s to discover how the homeless contend with new sociospatial strategies of control. Tucson is typical of the dozens of U.S. cities that are attempting to evict street people from urban cores that have been rediscovered as frontiers for development and capital investment. The article draws from a year-long ethnographic case study of six campers to analyze their everyday talk and placemaking as interrelated productions of meaning. The analysis shows that the campers’ meaning making was inseparable from their material struggles to survive. They used their talk and placemaking to construct alternative homes and workplaces, an alternative, self-affirming definition of homelessness, and the foundations of a critique against the “system” of institutions producing poverty and inequality. Their meaning making constituted a “weapon of the weak” which the campers deployed to wage a kind of symbolic guerrilla war against the dominant discourse on homelessness.     

Homeless women self-advocates: The quest from liminal to full citizenship

ABSTRACT

This essay explores how homeless women produce advocacy to gain full and substantive citizenship. Homeless women's attempts to gain recognition as full members of the society require them to transform lived experiences of trauma, exclusion, and loss into public arguments. Facing the intersection of civic exclusion by class and gender, homeless women are commonly viewed as welfare-dependent, irrational, and present-oriented, and are, therefore, considered the opposite of “good citizens.” Despite their legal citizenship, homeless women are essentially liminal citizens—their citizenship is lacking substantial political power and is thus barren. This essay explores how liminal citizens attempt to secure full citizenship by looking behind-the-scenes at their self-advocacy production process. Employing rhetorical field methods, the essay offers an interpretive reading of in-depth interviews with homeless women self-advocates and illuminates three aspects of the advocacy production process: recognizing the worth of the story; deciding to tell traumatic stories; and crafting the story. By unpacking the self-advocacy production process this essay animates the discussion about the mechanisms required to foster a deep and inclusive democracy from a rhetorical perspective.     

Undignified Dignity: Using Humor to Manage the Stigma of Mental Illness and Homelessness

Research on stigma has generally focused on either how stigmatized individuals manage their stigmatizing traits, how stigmatizing messages are communicated, or on how education and contact campaigns reduce the degree of stigma. This article seeks to expand on the communication stigma literature by arguing that stigmatized and unstigmatized individuals are able to co-manage stigmatizing traits through the cocreation of a culture of individualized dignity. Specifically, this ethnographic study examines the use of humor at a homeless shelter that caters to individuals with severe mental illness to create a culture of “undignified dignity.” The findings highlight how even complex stigmas may be ameliorated through a focus on dignity as a bridging medium between stigmatized and unstigmatized individuals.     

“Flipping the Scripts” of Poverty and Panhandling: Organizing Democracy by Creating Connections

This study relies on participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore how StreetWise, an organization with a newspaper by the same name, mobilizes symbolic and material support for people without homes or those at risk. Pragmatism is used to understand how StreetWise ameliorates the experience of homelessness by building community. In stark contrast to forces that erase “the homeless” from the public scene, StreetWise integrates people without homes, as vendors, into community life by providing employment and raising awareness about poverty-related issues. Through its structure, mission, and business plan StreetWise encourages an engaged citizenry and enhances civic discourses. StreetWise provides scholars with a context within which to understand the reflexive and interactive organization–society relationships that strive to support a democratic way of life.     

The Structuring of Invisibility Among the Hidden Homeless: The Politics of Space, Stigma, and Identity Construction

This ethnographic portrayal relies on participant observations at two supplemental support programs for youth without homes, narratives collected through in-depth interviews with educators and case managers, and focus group interviews with youth participants to explore the discursive (re)production of invisibility among youth without homes. Structuration theory is used to frame macro and micro forces coalescing to enable and constrain processes of invisibility among the hidden homeless. Analysis reveals how invisibility shapes (and is shaped by) processes of stigmatization, “street smarts” as enacted by youth, and “Mayberry” and “not in my backyard” community discourses, and how the disappearance of youth without homes simultaneously serves and undermines various stakeholders.     

The Structuring of Invisibility Among the Hidden Homeless: The Politics of Space,Stigma, and Identity Construction

This ethnographic portrayal relies on participant observations at two supplemental support programs for youth without homes, narratives collected through in-depth interviews with educators and case managers, and focus group interviews with youth participants to explore the discursive (re)production of invisibility among youth without homes. Structuration theory is used to frame macro and micro forces coalescing to enable and constrain processes of invisibility among the hidden homeless. Analysis reveals how invisibility shapes (and is shaped by) processes of stigmatization, “street smarts” as enacted by youth, and “Mayberry” and “not in my backyard” community discourses, and how the disappearance of youth without homes simultaneously serves and undermines various stakeholders.     

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.     

“This Right Here Is All About Living”: Communicating the “Common Sense” About Home Stability Through CBPR and Photovoice

Homelessness remains a major problem in the United States as a result of urban deprivation, economic decline, a rise in housing costs, and a decline in blue-collar wages. Meanwhile, the dominant discourses around homelessness tend to frame the matter in terms of individual deviance rather than structural impediments. This study utilizes Community-Based Participatory Research and the photovoice method to articulate what a small number of “successfully home stable individuals” attribute to helping them to remain home stable as well as those factors that challenge this situation. The study analyzes how these attributions challenge the “common sense” about homelessness by refiguring the concept as a reintegration process with manifold causes and paths into and out of episodic home instability and giving voice to formerly homeless individuals who are successfully navigating reintegration into housed society.     

Public Libraries,Serious Mental Illness,and Homelessness: A Survey of Public Librarians

The purpose of this survey was to investigate the perceptions that public librarians have of their user populations with regard to serious mental illness and its relationship to homelessness. The results found that a large number of public librarians experience concerns about the impact of such users upon other users and about the potential violence in these populations. Public librarians who took the survey expressed an interest in learning more about serious mental illness and a wish to achieve greater awareness of serious mental illness that could help them in their interactions with users who are experiencing serious mental illness.