“Because That’s What We Do . . . We Sit and We Drink and We Talk”: Stories and Storytelling among Street-Involved Youth

Eliciting stories of homelessness, past trauma, addiction, and street resilience is regarded widely as useful for understanding the problems youth face and enabling solutions. Young people’s stories of homelessness, past trauma, addiction, and street resilience can help illuminate the problems they face and identify possible solutions. Recent scholarship has conceptualized youth narratives in diverse ways, but how do young people view their stories and their telling? Drawing on our work in western Canada, we explore how a group of street-involved youth view stories as personal and collective memories, as strategies for negotiating the complex circumstances of their lives, and as especially powerful forms of recognition.