Beside One's Self: Homelessness Felt and Lived

Introduction

1 I N T R O D U C T I O N Homelessness Felt and Lived “Inadmissible Evidence” Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavouring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? Is there something to be gained in the political domain by maintaining grief as part of the framework within which we think our international ties? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability , to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? —Judith Butler, Precarious Life In confronting the incompleteness of my past research writings , I at once confront what I have come to see as an “emotional retreat” (Chamberlayne 2004, 347) in homelessness research. This is a retreat Prue Chamberlayne (ibid., 337) traces in the delivery of services to homeless people, a retreat driven by the contemporary constraints of “an auditdriven culture” that I want to argue has also had similar impacts on the kinds of knowledges made admissible in arenas of research traditionally linked with homelessness. As Andrew Cooper (in ibid., 337; see Cooper 2002) makes clear, “The lived qualitative, subjective and emotional experience of what it is really like at the heart of our educational system and welfare state is presently a form of inadmissible evidence,” and this situation has ensured a silencing of the trauma of homelessness in particular. 2 | Beside One’s Self In my reading on homelessness over the years, I have come to see that emotional and corporeal experience largely remains delegitimized in conceptualizations of what homelessness is and how it should be responded to. The predominantly North American body of psychological and medical research, for example, has focused on producing reliable statistical correlations of homelessness with a range of issues including physical and mental illness, physical and sexual abuse, addiction, post-traumatic stress, and so on. While such work offers important insights into the prevalence of these experiences, their lived corporeal and emotional impacts remain unaddressed in the available succession of brief journal articles that, in the scientific model of publication, aim to report findings rather than discuss or theorize them. Although there is a growing qualitative literature on homelessness within the social sciences, with the exception of Robert Desjarlais’s powerful ethnographic work Shelter Blues, this also rarely focuses empirically or analytically on the feeling-states associated with becoming and being homeless, nor does it seem that qualitative researchers have effectively disrupted the uncritical blurring of research and policy agendas that remain largely empiricist (Pleace and Quilgars 2003, 187). Keith Jacobs, Jim Kemeny, and Tony Manzi (1999, 11) argue that “homelessness is usually treated as an objective and objectifiable phenomenon, within the positivist tradition of social enquiry.” Dominating social scientific accounting for homelessness is a concern for the enumeration of homelessness and more recently for the enumeration of specific populations—of youth, single, and rural homeless, for example. Policy responses have traditionally focused on housing and have required accurate estimates of housing need and understandings of housing pathways in order “to allocate resources on a rational basis” (Chamberlain and MacKenzie 2002, 3). As such, housing-focused definitions of homelessness have ascended into broad usage within academic and policy research, public policy, and national data collection on homelessness. In Australia, for example, homelessness researchers Chris Chamberlain and David MacKenzie have worked to deliver a definition of homelessness that includes not just those sleeping rough but, more broadly, those whose living arrangements do not meet minimum housing standards. For Introduction | 3 Chamberlain and MacKenzie, the “primary homeless” are those people without conventional accommodation, such as rough sleepers or squatters ; the “secondary homeless” are those who move from one form of temporary accommodation to another, such as those moving between friends and crisis accommodation; the “tertiary homeless” are those who live in boarding houses long-term; and the “marginally housed” are those whose accommodation is “only slightly below the community norm.” Chamberlain and MacKenzie aim to avoid both what they see as the conservatism of a definitional focus on literal homelessness and the radicalism of self-definition that takes into account subjective interpretation of whether or not accommodation settings constitute appropriate housing. “In contrast,” Chamberlain and MacKenzie (1992, 293–94) write, “We have argued that theorising a socially constructed...