Beside One's Self: Homelessness Felt and Lived 9780815651352, 9780815632528

Citation preview

Cat her i neRobi nson

beside one’s self

Space, Place, and Society John Rennie Short, Series Editor

Selected titles from Space, Place, and Society Alabaster Cities: Urban U.S. since 1950 John Rennie Short At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space Irene Cieraad, ed. The Boundless Self: Communication in Physical and Virtual Spaces Paul C. Adams Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Nineteenth-Century American West Karen M. Morin Geography Inside Out Richard Symanski Imagined Country: Environment, Culture, and Society John Rennie Short Inventing Black-on-Black Violence: Discourse, Space, and Representation David Wilson Migrants to the Metropolis: The Rise of Immigrant Gateway Cities Marie Price and Lisa Benton-Short, eds. Putting Health into Place: Landscape, Identity, and Well-being Robin A. Kearns and Wilbert M. Gesler, eds. Women, Religion, and Space: Global Perspectives on Gender and Faith Karen M. Morin and Jeanne Kay Guelke, eds.

beside one’s self h o m ele s s n e s s felt and lived

Catherine Robinson

Syracuse University Press

Copyright © 2011 by Syracuse University Press Syracuse, New York 13244-5160 All Rights Reserved First Edition 2011 11 12 13 14 15 16

6 5 4 3 2 1

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit our Web site at SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu. ISBN-13: 978-08156-3252-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robinson, Catherine. Beside one’s self : homelessness felt and lived / Catherine Robinson. p. cm. — (Space, place, and society) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8156-3252-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Homelessness—Australia. I. Title. HV4630.A4R63 2011 362.50994—dc22 2011011112

Manufactured in the United States of America

To A., my love

Catherine Robinson worked in a youth refuge in inner-city Sydney

before taking up a position as research fellow in the Urban Frontiers Program at the University of Western Sydney, where she conducted a major Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute project on homelessness and mental illness. Catherine is now a senior lecturer researching and teaching in the areas of social and cultural theory, qualitative research methods, and philosophy of social research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney. Originally from Hobart, Tasmania, Catherine now lives in Sydney with her partner Andrew and children Cassius and Hester.

Contents Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

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I n t roduc t ion

Homelessness Felt and Lived “Inadmissible Evidence”

1

1. Corporeography Sensing the Other

23

2. Beside One’s Self

51

3. “Doing the Geographical” 4. Outside Community

79 105

Conc lusion

Remaking Homelessness Bibliography Index

163

149

130

Preface Though there are very great impediments to expressing another’s sentient distress, so are there also very great reasons why one might want to do so. —Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

T h e f ir st day of our holiday brought rain. As I stood on the balcony of the rented apartment watching the drizzle thicken along the coast I was alight with rage. I had completed the project fieldwork only to be faced with this. Three weeks of hot sun as I melted in boarding houses, trudged from drop-in to refuge, took endless wrong turns in the rental car. And now rain. I turned narrowing eyes on my partner, calmly propped up in bed reading. After being separated for three weeks, in one morning I was already sick of him. Couldn’t he see that now everything was ruined? What about the beach walks and the ocean? I’d been thinking about the ocean, about being rumbled by waves and starched by sun. I’d been thinking about salty kisses too. I was going to find the best shells yet and wait for turtles at the water’s edge. I was going to run circles on the beach, muck around in the shallows looking at tiny fish through my swimming goggles. I was going to point out the seabirds as they flew over. And now rain. I stood at the sink for a while listening to the kettle boil before climbing back into bed without making tea. I felt like a wind sock in a sudden breezeless moment, empty, tired, directionless. I felt like a draining bath, an unstoppable flow of life-force curling rapidly away. ix

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The first day of our holiday I sobbed until lunchtime and wept until dinner. It was as though the front bringing up the coastal showers settled in at my body-edges too. The tears came in gusts, soaking heavily, patches of weak sun clouding quickly again. It was interesting really, the way I became a river widening in bad weather, bending the grasses in, even turning small stones as my heart rushed the flow. A fieldwork jumble threatened the banks. The moment James suddenly bawled in fright at his own story, the thwack of mucus in the back of his throat, his shaking hand in mine on the laminated tabletop. Sam at seventeen, weighing up for me the advantages of a prison over psychiatric cell, his dead sisters’ names tattooed prettily on slim biceps. Isabel pointing out the trouble of visits home, with her tight-lipped father and the photos of her grinning predator-brother still hanging in the hallway. And Micah’s fingers, cut down to the first knuckle courtesy of drug-plugged arteries, resting on a perfect new-moon belly. On and on they rushed. A flash flood of voices, faces, smells, a swelling torrent of lost childhoods and children, lost bodies and freedoms, lost minds and found sufferings. I should have foreseen this, the whole bodily wreckage of fieldwork, the dramatic sense of aging, the holding on through unsafe places, the escape plans impossibly perfected at night in sleepless hotel rooms. That gray day on the coast had been brewing out to sea for some time. My fieldwork experiences accumulated emotional force. The interviews developed clarity with memorial duration; they made more sense the longer they circulated through my body, titrating through fascia and marrow. And I think I mourned then for how I couldn’t go back, for how I couldn’t not know now, for the permanency of grief instilled in me through this work. Something had been done to me for which I did not remember giving permission. That sorrowful river was not my own, however. It scoured through me ever fed by a groundwater of grief rising steadily from the biographies of homeless people with mental disorders participating in the research. This was a dark, chill water seeping up through the bedrock of abusive childhoods, through bodies battered into adulthood, through major illness and multiple addictions, through self-harm and suicidal behavior, through poverty and stigma, betrayal and loneliness. It seemed those taking part

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in my research were drowning, their faces slipping under the tanninstreaked surface even as we spoke. But there were no drownings; instead it was relentless survival that had marked the life paths of those I met. What shocked me most was the familiarity of this grief, of my own and homeless people’s sense of grief-stricken powerlessness. I had been here before. It was as though with the repetition of grief, biography after biography, my recently completed doctoral research with young homeless people was also suddenly clarified, intensified by this new barrage of interviews. The two projects ran together in a deluge of comprehension. This was homelessness, this rush of loss, this sodden grief. Homelessness was a state of being, of being grief-stricken, of feeling dispersed, fragmented, inconsolable. Beside one’s self. Homelessness was a fear, a suffering, an anger, a pleading for peace. It could not be outrun because it was inside. I felt the panic tumble in me, and now there were countless images that swelled as I pressed the covers to my face. Mary pointing to the stockpile of powerful medication growing at her beside, the final cure for agoraphobia. The scars of Tara’s last self-gutting healing under her faded print dress. Mary’s head dropping back with a wail, her cheekbones briefly cupping the tears before they streaked into the neckline of her nightie. Tara naming her five children in the care of strangers, the regretted armed robbery, the bashings worn regretted more. The pain of it, of life lived bereft of home. Homelessness was a wound, a bore receding beyond illumination, its puckered rim just a rough trace of violence borne. The Struggle for Feeling Back in 2000 I spent seven months conducting doctoral ethnographic research on the place relations of young homeless people living in the inner-city areas of Sydney. Initially I joined two mobile outreach teams operating in the inner-city—one offered meals at various locations where homeless people gathered at night, and one provided information resources to young female sex workers working from the streets in Kings Cross, Sydney’s red light district. With the approval and support of staff, I was also able to undertake participant observation in a youth drop-in center and in a service separately providing young people with crisis (three months) and medium-term (one year) accommodation. It was

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in the supportive context of these three services that I conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-four young men and twelve young women (aged between sixteen and twenty-seven). Most of these young people were homeless at the time of the interview, and all had prolonged or repeated episodes of homelessness over a year or more. In the interviews, I focused on the ways in which, despite a broad context of social and spatial exclusion, young people were able to forge important habitual relationships of belonging and connectedness through place. The final work was entitled Being Somewhere, and a number of consequent journal articles took up the theme of young people’s establishment of homeplaces within the context of homelessness (Robinson 2001; 2002). As these articles and the thesis itself illustrated, I was determined to showcase the resilient practices of home building and place claiming which characterized young people’s survival in often hostile urban and suburban spaces. Within a year of finishing my PhD, however, my vision of homelessness had started to shift. Following my thesis fieldwork, I was employed as a youth worker in the accommodation services where I had conducted my research. I worked doing relief shifts for two years as part of a team providing a therapeutic environment in which chronically homeless young people could experience care and safety and have access to a range of allied health, mental health, drug and alcohol, and education services. In this role, my longer-term and intensified interaction with young people, some of whom I had first met during my fieldwork, drastically impacted on the account of homelessness that I had attended to in my thesis work. Witnessing the repeated cycles of homelessness and addiction and the cumulative health and mental health decline of many clients began to trigger a reevaluation of my prior emphasis on and interest in young people’s interstitial place claims. In 2002 I worked on a further research project that strongly compounded the new insights my different service-delivery engagement in the field had afforded. In 2002 I took up a role as chief investigator on a nationally significant project exploring the key factors driving homelessness for those with mental disorders. This year-long project, funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), included 185 face-to-face surveys and twenty-eight biographic interviews with

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homeless people of all ages, all of whom experienced mental health disorders. The fieldwork ran in the inner-city areas of Sydney and Brisbane, and similarly to my doctoral work, took place in multiple accommodation and drop-in services with the approval and support of staff. The interviews and surveys focused on the life circumstances surrounding revolving pathways in and out of accommodation and homelessness. I undertook all of the biographic interviews myself as well as worked with small assistant teams at the two research sites to complete the surveys. This project revealed the key role of traumatic incidents as well as enduring traumatic stress in the continual loss of housing for those with mental disorders. Both interviews and surveys recorded shocking trajectories of abuse, violence, and consequent illness tied to repeated episodes of homelessness that in some cases had persisted throughout an individual’s life course. As I will discuss further, the fieldwork was intensely emotional and deeply impressed upon me the anguish entwined in living homeless. Alongside what I had learned through the intimate relationships I had built with young people as a youth worker, interviewing homeless adults for the first time enabled a more coherent comprehension of homelessness as a long-term multidimensional experience of grief-stricken dislocation, a dislocation further compounded with every repeated wave of trauma and housing loss. And while a consideration of aspects of such dislocation had been an important component of my original thesis work, it seemed that the life-spanning view provided by the biographic interviews in particular brought together all that I had learned since. I was left with a profound realization of homelessness as an unbearable ache that was only half-said, half-thought but so fully felt by those homeless and in turn, at the completion of the fieldwork, by me. At the time, though, I had to get on with the battery of contracted policy-oriented reports that mobilized a useful, if predictable, framework of social exclusion to help piece out the full range of factors driving homelessness for those with mental disorders. I nonetheless gave uncompromising focus to the key role of cumulative trauma but knew I was yet to make full sense of the ramifications of the project for my changing understanding of homelessness and for the process of conducting research itself.

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In 2005 an article appeared in Social and Cultural Geography in which I began to push into the emotional terrain of homelessness that I had become so hauntingly aware of. In the article I refocused on material from one chapter of my thesis that had dealt more closely with young homeless people’s traumatic displacement from home in a common context of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. This article turned into my first attempt to analytically frame and explore the felt dimension of homelessness, and soon, in order to develop a much deepened and complex account, I began a project of reengaging more fully with the fieldwork from both the doctoral and AHURI projects. In my return to these works, not only did I want to specifically pursue the feeling of homelessness, to make empirical sense of what manner of emotional and corporeal suffering characterized the experience of becoming and being homeless, but I also wanted to finally address the methodological silences in my work, particularly in the AHURI project. The emotional turmoil of the AHURI project—largely unspoken in the project reports—had taken a personal toll, but I had become convinced that it was precisely the permeating weight of my research, its enduring echo, that needed unraveling as the key mode and conduit through which I engaged with and formed an understanding of the affective dimension of homelessness. While observational material, survey data, and thematic analyses of interview transcripts were all crucial in building an understanding of the dual contexts of homelessness and mental disorders, there was a perhaps more potent and enlarged analysis undertaken through the sensorial and emotional capacities of my researching body—and it was this analysis that now pressingly called for exploration and fuller articulation. Consideration of what seemed to be a corporeal research methodology had certainly fallen well outside of the expected intellectual and professional parameters of the AHURI project, which was targeted at state and federal housing departments in particular. And so finally this resulting book documents my struggle to make feeling—as both research practice and lived experience—crucial to thinking about homelessness. At its basis is a disquiet both with my own and others’ research that has so far largely failed to provide just acknowledgment of the feeling-states central to homelessness and to the process of

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conducting research on homelessness. As I argue here, these two silences characteristic of homelessness research can usefully be understood as linked and mutually reinforcing—for it is surely the researcher’s reflexive emotional and corporeal engagement in the field that is critical to making possible her description of its affective ebbs and flows. What is it to feel homeless, to be without the orienting geography of home? Beside One’s Self delivers a response to this question making equally central retrospective reexaminations of my past ethnographic and biographic fieldwork data and reexaminations of my researching body itself as an articulate and data-rich register of the felt dimension of homelessness. As such, this book does not traditionally present the findings of a single ethnographic or biographic study and is instead grounded in an experimental methodological approach that firmly places the researching body at the fieldwork scene and makes explicit the researcher’s role as a research participant. Beside One’s Self intervenes in the usual qualitative focus on homeless people’s narratives by including the researcher’s voice among those of the researched and by acknowledging and foregrounding the collaborative and inscriptive nature of affect. More broadly, the book takes up the political valency of such felt resonance with homelessness and contributes to empirical, methodological, and theoretical developments taking place within emotional geography and the sensory ethnography of place. The book can also be read in part as an engagement with the landscape of homelessness in Australia and in particular with the complex issues that connect to prolong the ongoing search for home by a small but significant group for whom homelessness is a long-term process of cycling through multiple forms of unstable accommodation, squatting, and rough sleeping. In a broader context of rising housing prices and falling ownership rates, a major shrinkage of public housing stock, and skyrocketing private rental prices, it has become clear that despite the relatively small number of homeless in Australia—estimated in 2006 to be around 105,000 (Chamberlain and MacKenzie 2008, vii)—homelessness remains a persistent problem in conditions of economic upturn and downturn in part due to a fundamental lack of affordable housing. With prohibitive waits for public housing and average apartment rents in Sydney at around A$400

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and in Brisbane at A$330 (Gilbert 2009, 12), even those receiving maximum welfare support provided by the federal government of around A$670 a fortnight (a disability pension with rent assistance) cannot even consider the private rental market, let alone be placed in any way to compete in rental bidding—a recently growing practice—over the few properties left available for rent. As such, existing welfare supports to assist people with housing in the private sector, such as the Commonwealth Rental Assistance Scheme, actually bypass the most vulnerable in that they do not account for the growing population pressure on the private rental market reflected in turn in critically high rental prices and critically low vacancy rates—under 2 percent in Sydney and Brisbane in 2008 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2008, 177). Stress on housing and homelessness services further intensifies in capital cities such as Sydney and Brisbane because of the migration of those becoming homeless in desperately under-serviced regional areas. In 2006, the Australian Bureau of Statistics Counting the Homeless Project estimated the homeless population in the greater Sydney area to be 15,956, with 5,221 in the inner-city (Chamberlain and MacKenzie 2009a, 45–46), and the greater Brisbane homeless population to be around 7,996, with 2,070 in the inner-city area (Chamberlain and MacKenzie 2009b, 53). The states of which these cities are capitals register the largest homeless populations nationally at around 27,000 each (Chamberlain and MacKenzie 2008, 35–36). And though Sydney and Brisbane also have higher concentrations of services for those homeless, with so few exit options, the homelessness sector that predominantly provides crisis accommodation for a three-month period finds itself both unable to meet crisis needs and the needs of existing clients who may be understood to experience longterm or “chronic crisis” (Robinson and Searby 2006, 17) and who have often over-stayed their short-term accommodation by months, or in some cases, years. Increasing criticism of, and frustration within, crisis accommodation services has highlighted in particular the range of nonhousing needs associated with homelessness and the fact that accommodation services have never been funded or designed to appropriately respond to these. The sector has been seen to be failing those who need long-term affordable secure

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accommodation as well as those who need long-term accommodation and support to address other multiple health and mental health, employment, and addiction issues. Indeed, the key joint federal and state response to homelessness, the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program, which fully or partly funds the majority of crisis services nationwide, has come under criticism for its incapacity to respond appropriately to people whose needs are described as “high and complex” (NSW Ombudsman 2004). Most likely to feel or to be actively excluded from mainstream homelessness services, those with high and complex needs may rely more heavily on very basic mobile food and referral services designed for rough sleepers. In Australia, however, efforts to address rough sleeping remain fragmented with outreach programs funded ad hoc by progressive local governments or by some welfare agencies. Further, the problem of where to refer rough sleepers to always remains. The particular characteristic of homelessness in Australia then is its consistent presence and, in more recent years, a perceived growing proportion of those with complex needs who are more likely to experience long-term or repeated episodes of homelessness (Bisset, Campbell, and Goodall 1999, 18), often in conjunction with a range of health, mental health, and addiction issues. It is estimated that in most developed countries this vulnerable group whose homelessness extends over six months and mostly over years represents a significant and stable proportion of the homeless population of around 15 to 25 percent, despite national differences in total population sizes (Reynolds 2008, 4–5). It is individuals within this group, on which my research has focused, who are most likely to be circling between inappropriate, under-funded services, other forms of unstable accommodation and rough sleeping, and, as will be discussed further in the introduction, whose experiences of extreme, multidimensional displacement are not adequately reflected in dominant operational definitions of homelessness. Positively, however, it seems as though the persistent shadow of homelessness in Australia has reemerged as a new focus for social policy. After nearly twelve years of leadership by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, in 2007 the Australian public voted in Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who shortly after taking office made it clear that tackling homelessness

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would be a key part of the new government’s moral and policy platforms. While of course it is too early to see what on the ground outcomes will flow from proposed reforms, what is impressive so far is the contemporary conceptualization of what homelessness is and the clear recognition of existing problems in service funding, coordination, and delivery. In particular, The Road Home, the key policy document that frames the new national initiative to address homelessness, very clearly articulates the “wrap-around support” (Commonwealth of Australia 2008, 15) and specialist homelessness services that may be needed alongside housing to address homelessness for some and, importantly, makes the lack of exits from homelessness in Australia the key starting point for formulating a response that includes significant reinvestment in long-term affordable housing options in both the public and private sectors. As such this book emerges at a potential turning point in the history of homelessness in Australia, a turning point at which understandings of homelessness might be further broadened and so too the range of responding services. In particular, Beside One’s Self makes a specific case for the importance of understanding and articulating the causes, experiences, and impacts of long-term transience that so often include extreme emotional and corporeal suffering and as such are often qualitatively different from shorter-term experiences of housing crisis. The book develops an argument about the centrality of affect in any national imagining of homelessness and begins the work of literally fleshing out an account of homelessness that can include the traumatic bodily experiences that can both cause and constitute it. Through interrogating feeling, a new politics of homelessness is proposed, an affective politics that communicates emotional and corporeal need and promotes embodied practices of care in research, service delivery, policy development, and public engagement with those homeless.

Acknowledgments

T h is book emerges in a large part from my experiences working on a number of funded projects on homelessness since 2002. Though I do not explicitly develop material from all of them here, they include “Understanding Iterative Homelessness: The Case of People with Mental Disorders,” funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute; “Squatting: What’s the Reality?” funded by the Service and Regional Research Program of the then Commonwealth Department of Family and Community Services; and “Accommodation in Crisis: Forgotten Women in Western Sydney,” funded by Parramatta Mission and UTS (University of Technology, Sydney) Shopfront. These projects and my preceding doctoral research were facilitated on the ground in Sydney and Brisbane by nongovernment organizations working to both address and advocate for the housing, health, and support needs of those experiencing homelessness. Staff in these organizations were extremely generous in assisting and participating in my research and, through their many thoughtful conversations with me about my work and their own, they continued to inspire and re-center me when I felt I lost my way. Centrally, this book is made possible by the frank and reflective contributions of people of all ages experiencing homelessness whom I met in the course of undertaking my various projects. These contributions were intellectual, strident, sorrowful, and sometimes darkly piercing and hilarious. I have kept good company over the last years and hope to have given some too. xix

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Sections of the introduction and chapter 1 first appeared as “Felt Homelessness: The Contribution of Qualitative Approaches to Homelessness Research” in Qualitative Housing Analysis: An International Perspective, edited by Paul Maginn, Susan Thompson, and Matthew Tonts, 91–111 (Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing, 2008), and “Homelessness Felt” in Cultural Studies Review 15, no. 1 (2009): 167–72. I thank Terry Clinton from the Marketing and Communications Unit, UTS, for providing the author photo. Original photographic works were very kindly provided for the cover by James Croucher (http://jamescroucher.com). For work on this book, I have gratefully received a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Enhancement of Research Performance Grant and a UTS Early Career Research Grant. I appreciate the support offered to me during my six months as a visiting fellow in the School of Social Science and Policy, University of New South Wales, where I worked peacefully during a period of study leave provided by UTS. There are many UTS colleagues who have become friends in the writing of this book, and in particular I would like to thank Katherine Gordon, Virginia Watson, and Katrina Schlunke, who in their different ways have cared for me, been unstintingly patient with me, and have helped me to keep writing. I thank Chris Ho, Catherine Cole, Paul Ashton, and Robert Button for their continued interest in my work. I would also like to thank my students, in particular those who have undertaken Social, Political, Historical Studies Honours Seminar, with whom many of the ideas of this book have been discussed. Rose Searby and Kirsty Martin have paid unwavering attention to every high and low and, with Anna Yokoyama and Sally Blyth, have attended to my soul and to that particular muddle of writing, friendship, and motherhood. Because of the faith of Lisa Bostock, Bill Randolph and Brendan Gleeson gave me a start, which set me on this path. I have greatly benefited from the intellectual engagement and emotional support of many people within the homelessness sector, including Sue Cripps, Felicity Reynolds, Jon Haynes, Brian Smith, Trish Bramble, Jane Bullen, and Noel Murray. The astute advice of Mary Selden Evans, executive editor at Syracuse University Press, and John Short, series editor, has helped to shape my work as a book, and I thank Mary in particular for her initial and

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ongoing conviction, Marcia Hough for her assistance with detail, and Julie DuSablon for her compassionate copyediting. My community of friends and family in Sydney and elsewhere have richly nourished me—intellectually, emotionally, and physically. The Warrington family has been steadfast, and in particular I thank my grandmother Edith Wojtowicz who shared much of my life and read much of my work, and with whom I discussed the key themes and progress of this book often and up until her death in September 2008. Finally, I thank Corinne, Michael, and Lawrence for the home I left and Andrew, Cassius, and Hester for the home I have come into.

beside one’s self

INTRODUCTION

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

I n con f ron t i ng t h e i ncom plet en ess 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. 1

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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

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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 account of homelessness can provide an analytical framework that is neither arbitrary nor reducible to individual subjectivity. Since the cultural definition is grounded in evidence about the housing practices in a community, it can also be translated into operational concepts.” Chamberlain and MacKenzie’s definition has been much welcomed in Australia because of its vital role in broadening the focus by policy makers and the general public on “street homelessness,” and because of the analytical and service delivery frameworks that the articulation of primary, secondary, and tertiary degrees of homelessness seem to suggest. MacKenzie and Chamberlain (2003) show that people can experience homelessness differently and that a range of responses are needed depending on where a person might be in his or her “homeless career” that ultimately leads him or her toward primary homelessness. Their definition framed the first Counting the Homeless project that formed part of the 1996 Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data collection, ensuring the inclusion of people in different contexts of homelessness from rough sleeping to crisis accommodation to doubling up with family or friends (Chamberlain 1999). The census gave rise to the powerful figure of 105,300 homeless people in Australia (ibid., 2), which has been vital in attracting both media and policy attention to homelessness and related issues. Perhaps most significantly, the Report on Aspects of Youth Homelessness (House of Representatives Standing Committee on Community Affairs 1995, 26) claimed “an

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emerging community consensus” for a version of Chamberlain and MacKenzie’s definition and called for it to be used in framing “recommendations relating to public policy initiatives.” As Chamberlain (1999, 1) argues strongly, “There can be no meaningful public debate about the best policy responses to assist homeless people, unless there is reliable information on the number of homeless people in the community. This requires an ‘operational definition’ of homelessness which can be easily measured, and credible data on the population identified by the definition.” A problematic effect of such research, however, is the tendency for housing-focused definitions of homelessness developed for measurement to be used to conceptualize homelessness itself. Despite the fact that homelessness is now commonly understood as being caused and perpetuated by complex networks of macro, meso, and micro factors including the lack of affordable housing, the lack of social support structures, a lack of informal support, and crises in individual biographies (Avramov 1999, 6–9), it is the lack of appropriate housing that has been broadly utilized as the key indicator of homelessness. Thus, “debate about the range of housing need which should be defined as homelessness” (Fitzpatrick 2000, 40) has taken the place of debates about the wider range of issues constituting homelessness, of which the struggle to access accommodation is only one. Chamberlain and MacKenzie’s work also remains somewhat troubling, not because of its importantly strategic policy aims but because of its advocacy at times for the epistemological containment of research on homelessness. Fears about the potential “relativism” of research (Chamberlain and MacKenzie 1998, 28) and the desire to generalize a specifically targeted policy-relevant definition to all aspects of an extremely complex social phenomenon convey the passionate convictions of these researchers. Such work may be seen to also dangerously promote the seclusion of social policy issues like homelessness from interdisciplinary theoretical, methodological, and epistemological critique and debate. In particular, interpretive evidences remain disenfranchised through recourse to the pending threat of government inaction. As Chamberlain and MacKenzie (ibid.) argue, “The disabling problem of intellectual relativism ought to be allowed to die quietly,” because, “after all, if homelessness is impossible to define, why should governments act to alleviate this nebulous condition?”

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Under such conditions of representation in which homelessness has been defined in operational rather than experiential terms, getting the emotional and corporeal dimensions of homelessness onto research and policy agendas is difficult. That homelessness is a “nebulous condition” as Chamberlain and MacKenzie suggest seems surely the very rationale for a more radically open definition rather than one that seeks to contain homelessness within particular measurable parameters that are, in turn, perhaps more reflective of the needs of researchers and policy makers than of homeless people. Who “counts” as homeless is established at the cost of obscuring the multidimensional nature of homelessness felt and lived and at the cost of restricting the range of evidences prioritized in research deemed policy relevant. This situation is especially problematic for the more complex conceptualization of homelessness needed for long-term homelessness and for contexts in which lack of access to appropriate housing is not the primary issue that underpins or characterizes episodes of homelessness. Longterm or persistent homelessness has most usefully been conceptualized as the result of the extremes of social exclusion where a compounded struggle to access housing, education, employment, well-being, and a sense of social connectedness is faced. Wider policy responses addressing social integration and cohesion have been emphasized as necessary for responding to homelessness that takes a broader form as exclusion. Such responses focus in particular on the “relational” as well as “distributional” exclusion experienced by homeless people and importantly stress that while securing housing of a minimum standard is important, it is not enough to solve homelessness for some. As Dragana Avramov (1999, 3) reminds us, “Homelessness as a specific form of extreme social exclusion and social detachment of individuals cannot be understood and tackled effectively from the perspective of generic debates about unmet housing needs, unemployment and material deprivation which ‘ultimately and inevitably’ lead to homelessness.” Though the language of social exclusion and inclusion does begin to give articulation to a nonmaterial dimension of homelessness, this remains rather bluntly conceived in such work as “desocialisation,” “disaffiliation” (Tosi 1999, 129), and “social fragilisation” (Avramov 1999, 5). The

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United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) (2000, xiii), for example, defines homelessness as “a condition of detachment from society characterised by the lack of the affiliative bonds that link people to their social structures.” This definition usefully emphasizes that “homelessness carries implications of belonging nowhere rather than simply having nowhere to sleep” (UNCHS/Habitat 2000, xiii) but how pervasive nonbelonging is actually experienced and what its lived impacts are, including how it contributes to trajectories of homelessness, remain underexplored. A sense of the relational and affective dimensions of homelessness is better developed by a small group of researchers working predominantly in the areas of cultural geography and environmental psychology who have specialized, as part of the project of understanding homelessness, in plumbing the depths of “home” as a felt signifier of well-being, beingin-place, and belonging (for example, see Kearns and Smith 1994; Moore 2000; Rivlin and Moore 2001; Somerville 1992). Although the notion of home has more commonly been utilized to challenge and expand definitions of homelessness focusing on “houselessness” or “rooflessness,” such as in the reconceptualization of homelessness as social exclusion in much European research, the fledgling body of work on home and homelessness is also central to the exploration of homelessness as an emotional and corporeal phenomenon. It pays attention to the contested experiential, existential, emotional, and psychological importance of “homeplace” (hooks 1990), and, though unfortunately to a lesser extent, to the potentially disastrous and enduring impacts of being without it. The key to understanding homelessness in much of this critically important scholarship is first to conceptualize home as a fundamentally felt relationship of place and self and second, as April Veness’s (1992, 1993) research demonstrates, as a concept open to multiple interpretations and lived meanings. As Julia Wardhaugh (2000, 77) succinctly states, “Home is at least partially a physical place, but is more a state of being,” and for Kate Nunan and Llewellyn Johns (1996, 4), home is “an emotional space and place of intimate feelings.” The felt dimension of home is more generally revealed in this work as a primal spatial and corporeal relationship that generates ontological security and orients the self psychologically, socially, spiritually, and temporally in the world. To be at home is to be at

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home with oneself, to be at home in “residence” and “place” (May 2000, 738), to be at home in local and even global communities. In the context of homelessness research, an interpretive conceptualization of home is significant as it helps to throw into relief not just the material impacts of the lack of appropriate housing but the potential existential and emotional dimensions of home-lessness. Most commonly, being home-less is conceptualized in felt terms as a demoralizing experience of vulnerability, rootlessness, and powerlessness. Samira Kawash (1998, 327) argues, “Homelessness is not only being without home, but more generally without place.” To be homeless is to be both without a place of shelter and “home as place” (May 2000, 738), to be without the personal and affective space and place attachments that orient and order self-identity and without the social networks a broader conception of home articulates. As Edward Casey (1993, xv) suggests, homelessness is a profound experience of displacement: “To lack primal place is to be ‘homeless’ indeed, not only in the literal sense of having no permanently sheltering structure but also as being without any effective means of orientation in a complex and confusing world.” While it is generally agreed that in Western, developed nations the majority of those who become homeless do so for only a short period of time before housing is resecured, it is also clear that a significant and growing proportion of people experience a long-term vulnerability to recurrent episodes of homelessness. It is in this latter context that the broader conceptualization of home-lessness becomes crucial. Vulnerability to homelessness may be enduringly embedded through experiences of mental illness and the disembodying post-traumatic effects of tragic and life-threatening events, physical and sexual abuse, and violence. Compounding existing crises are also the effects of the “lifestyle trauma” (Coleman 2000, 21) associated with living homeless, which may include increased stress, exposure to further violence and abuse, and intensified health and mental health problems. Further, as perpetual transience becomes part of the struggle to survive, fragile social and geographical networks must be continually abandoned, leaving those already marginalized without even the resource and comfort of familiar faces and landscapes.

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For “the marginalised homeless” (Tosi 1999, 140), those experiencing long and complex cycles of housing loss, it can be expected that many will experience homelessness in its widest-ranging form. That is, some people not only experience the stress of material deprivation and housing exclusion but also experience a profoundly disturbing home-lessness seeped in the enduring and compounded distress of being corporeally, geographically, and socially displaced. If to be at home in an ideal sense is to reside in “three homes” (Kraybill 2007, 31), to feel at home with one’s self, in place, and in community, then being at the extremes of homelessness is to be not just without stable housing but to feel in the most profound way, beside one’s self, transient and estranged. So why then is affectivity delegitimized in representations of homelessness? What secures the silence of existential and bodily suffering in much homelessness research and policy development? If the experience of homelessness needs to be imagined for some as more than the lack of appropriate accommodation then, for a start, must it not be stretched to include corporeal and emotional notions of home-lessness? Should it not include a sense of the compounded losses and needs that homelessness suggests, of which housing is only one? Could in fact the absence of appropriate housing be symptomatic of other, more complex forms of home-lessness? Could some forms of homelessness even be somewhat decoupled from housing issues and be better understood in the broader terms of enduring rootlessness, of nonbelonging, or of the corrosive impacts of trauma? How should the encompassing experience of feeling homeless inside be articulated and addressed? There is a charged traumatic emotionality central to becoming and being homeless that requires a response. Homelessness describes forms of embodied, emotional suffering. The rightful concern to de-pathologize those homeless, however, has perhaps unintentionally instigated a wrongful abandonment of the responsibility for individual suffering. The shift from individual blame and criminalization to social welfare policy has similarly left grief untouched. While many argue that of course empiricist definitions are essential for the policy which equitably addresses multiple issues of structural inequality, I wonder if key issues of trauma, dislocation, and estrangement particularly prominent

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in trajectories of persistent homelessness are ignored precisely because of this, because they elude easy understanding, ownership, operationalization, and intervention. If so, the struggle to make the suffering of homelessness more effectively “count” in policy responses must disrupt “the dominant hold exercised by objectivist beliefs upon both science and common sense” (Pels 2000, 5). Epistemological Rupturings My disruption of the homelessness field stems from questioning how homelessness is felt, how felt homelessness is lived, negotiated, survived. My intention is to contribute further analytical complexity to homelessness—predominantly conceptualized as a crisis in housing access—by accounting for homelessness as also an emotional and bodily crisis. I want to write here of what it feels like to be not just without accommodation but to be persistently out-of-place and beside one’s self, placeless and estranged. I write in particular response to the slow recognition within much research and policy work on homelessness of the “psychological and social trauma” (Nunan and Johns 1996, 23) of homelessness. The vulnerability, suffering, and cumulative trauma that both triggers and characterizes experiences of homelessness thinly registers. The felt dimension of homelessness, its corporeal, sentient impact, is subject to the further “violence of derealisation” (Butler 2004, 33) in much accounting for homelessness and yet offers a crucial lead into new ways of thinking about and responding to it. As Phil Crane and Jillian Brannock (1996, 7) argued over a decade ago, “It is critical to accommodate and respond to . . . felt homelessness . . . which is characterised by feelings of insecurity, a lack of safety or of not belonging, and is central to a person-centred definition of homelessness.” As I have foreshadowed, however, an interpretive analytical approach that attempts to open existential and emotional dimensions of homelessness to exploration risks being declared unusable in the policy environment. This risk seems to stem not only from the status of the subjective evidence itself that such an approach might produce and rely upon, but from the epistemological implications of openly interpretive research for social policy more generally. Such research reflexively demonstrates, for

10 | Beside One’s Self example, that knowledge and definition are always arbitrary, subjective, and therefore political, rather than stable, objective, and therefore scientific. As Watson (2000, 160) worries, in the context of homelessness, “How indeed could subjective experiences get interpellated into policy discourse and with what effects? Regulations, standards and definitions of necessity have to be equitable, consistent and objective.” Rather than fearing the “epistemological rupture” (Bourdieu 1992, 251) that subjective, felt evidence might trigger in the field of homelessness and therefore closing the doors to its potential contribution in advance, it is surely more productive to imagine that different forms of knowledge might be valued precisely for the different insights they provide. While I agree with Malcolm Williams (2003, 1.1) that “there is much more to the social world than agents’ understanding of it,” local knowledge is only contextualized rather than devalued by this observation. It is critical, as Leanne Rivlin (1990, 53) argues, to develop “grounded directions for public policy” and to develop “policies that emerge from an understanding of the individual needs and personal strengths” of homeless people and from “the trauma of a homeless existence.” In this context, an interpretive research strategy that can open researcher and policy maker to subjective, individual accounts of needs, strengths, and traumas in fact becomes a critical component of appropriate research practice and policy development. The efficacy of an interpretive approach that seeks to make admissible, to make visible the felt-experience of homelessness, also remains questionable, however, for others not specifically concerned with the local details of policy development and implementation. As Susan Sontag (2003, 114) argues, “To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames” and as Butler (2004, 146) warns, “It would be a mistake to think that we only need find the right and true images, and a certain reality will then be conveyed.” Joan W. Scott (1991, 779) too insists that research that aims to represent experience necessarily reproduces the ideological terms of its production, rather than intervening in them. Desjarlais (1997, 25) likewise makes an insistent case for the abandonment of the study of experience in itself and instead argues for the

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development of “a critical phenomenology that can help us not only to describe what people feel, think, or experience but also grasp how the processes of feeling, of experiencing, come about through multiple, interlocking interactions.” Similarly, Talmadge Wright (1997), an ethnographer of homelessness, remains committed to a critical sociological analysis of homelessness as “an ideological term that serves to maintain the borders between the cultural capitals of middle-class society and the poor” (15) and argues that “ethnographic reports often suppress mention of the structural features that generate the conditions for homelessness, or at the very least fail to integrate the ethnographic findings with larger structuralist concerns of politics, culture and economy” (37). Not only do these researchers point to the analytical limitations of taking experience as an “origin” for research (Scott 1991, 780), but they also ask sticky questions about the constitution of experience as knowable in the first instance. For Desjarlais (1997, 13–14), the constitution of experience necessarily relies on a metaphysics of presence, in other words, on the historical and cultural development of a concept of a self with the capacity for internality and to reflexively access and make meaningful its emotional and sensory “engagement in the world.” As both Scott and Desjarlais suggest, it is precisely this humanistic, “feeling self” (Sinclair and Monk 2005, 336) that must be subjected to analytical scrutiny in order to disrupt the assumed authenticity, transparency, and originality of experience as the “uncontestable” evidence of the subject (Scott 1991, 777). Assuming the stability and accessibility of one’s own and others’ experience at once reconstitutes the notion of always self-present selves whose differences are simply reinscribed through “the project of making experience visible” (ibid., 778) rather than challenged through an investigation of “how difference is explored, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world” (ibid., 777). Together, Scott, Desjarlais, and Wright make a strong case that phenomenological, historical, and anthropological approaches that insist on following out the descriptive, “ordinary-language notion of experience as the felt sense of life” (Desjarlais 1997, 248), hold back politically invested analyses of experience as produced and unhelpfully ascribe an independent materiality and internality to experience. Rather than inverting but

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repeating a foundationalism usually associated with positivism (Jay 2005, 250), a “critical” approach is needed and is constituted as such according to Desjarlais (1997, 25), by going “beyond phenomenological description to understand why things are this way” and by addressing “the perennial critique that phenomenological approaches tend to neglect broader social and political dynamics in accounting for subjective realities.” Scott panics that the project of visibility will preclude her favored approach of analyzing the historically contingent ideological constructions that give rise to experience; she instead calls for researchers to “attend to the historical processes that, through discourse, position subjects and produce their experiences” (Scott 1991, 779). This would be to make one’s analytical question, as Mona Domosh (2003, 109) clarifies, “In what ways, for example, have societal power relationships come to be experienced as subjective truths?” It would seem then, that the project of materializing the subjective truths of felt homelessness by making foundational the knowledge generated through the intersubjective relationship of researcher and researched occupies a precarious space made doubly inadmissible by both objectivist and constructionist orientations to research. In pursuing ordinary-language accounts of corporeal and emotional experiences of homelessness, I undermine the process of operationalizing human experience and the encompassing value of measurement. In both starting and finishing my examination of felt homelessness within the realm of experience, my approach also limits the exposure of the “normative horizon” (Butler 2001, 22) that underpins homelessness and threatens to reinscribe the assumed original and truthful status of experience. I determinedly undertake the project of making visible felt homelessness, however, with the perspective that “no method of inquiry can avoid metaphysics” (Desjarlais 1997, 24) and that the foregrounding and backgrounding of different conceptualizations of homelessness—as constituted, as felt, as operationalized—enables a more holistic understanding in the end. Just as there is a place for a positivist account of homelessness, there are places for critical-constructionist and interpretive ones too. Each one should simply be understood to constitute a different rather than more useful imaginary of homelessness; each one also calls for a differently

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useful political, ethical, and practical response to homelessness. Such a recognition of the need for a critical dialogue of perspectives in addressing a social issue such as homelessness might also ease Scott’s concerns. While Wright, a powerful and inspiring writer on homelessness, poverty, and collective action, would no doubt find my decision not to analyze the political and social institutionalization of poverty to be as deeply troubling as the overly objectivist social scientific work he also critiques, it should be clear that his questioning of the ways in which “types of speaking ‘for’” homeless people may contribute to their further disempowerment and invisibility is also central to my project here (Wright 1997, 31). Similarly, the “threat” posed to positivist approaches by interpretive ones should be feared less than the closure of the field of homelessness to epistemological and theoretical plurality. It must nonetheless be said that in noting that there are different ways to represent homelessness, I do not specifically address the problematic logic Scott identifies in taking individual experience of homelessness as transparent and uncontested evidence or, indeed, as the best or only form of evidence through which to make known the experiential domain. Scott helpfully throws into relief the problematic relationship between the much broader and more complex category of experience she wants to work with—the enaction and embodiment of ideological categories—and what I call felt-experience—the subjective interpretation or “narration of experience” (Domosh 2003, 109) individuals make. I do not press on regardless of the fundamental point that an experience such as homelessness is not reducible to individuals’ felt conceptualization of it and, as Domosh (2003, 109) worries, I certainly do not want to see the decontextualization or naturalization of felt-experience as an original or even pathological attribute of different others. I feel the stinging obviousness of Scott’s clear vision of the need to go beyond felt-experience and am likewise struck by Domosh’s (2003, 109) accusation that by focusing on felt-experience I might disallow research subjects a complex subjectivity I claim for myself. I continue to be intrigued, however, by the epistemological ruptures that individual narrations of felt-experience seem to cause, and it is not clear that dispersing the origins of their expression is the only way to deal with the starting point for analysis they suggest. Though I remain troubled

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by the clear dangers and circumscriptions of an analytical approach that takes felt-experience as an origin for research, I also remain drawn by the possibilities of such an approach; I cannot leave it alone despite the fair warning. What might be the value of individual narrations of feltexperience? What is the value of descriptively focusing on the limited yet peculiarly rich, subjective account of felt-reality? The very fact that experience as Scott wants it imagined cannot be reduced to felt-experience to me suggests the resilient contribution narrations of felt-experience might make. More specifically, I see different knowledges at work in the narration of experience as felt and lived and in the narration of experience as the expression of compounded social, political, historical, cultural forces to which Scott (1991) points. Livedexperience, as perhaps the central root and possibility of feminism and indeed Marxism (see Hartsock 1997), clearly has some epistemological and political clout (Grosz 1994, 94). This leverage develops not as an alternative knowledge grounded somehow outside of discursive or ideological operations of power as Elizabeth Grosz (ibid.) also notes (the problematic claim of many standpoint approaches), but as an alternative knowledge grounded in the affective “intelligence” of the body itself (Thrift 2004, 60). There is a need then for the description of the felt that only the subject of affect can give in the first instance, not as the final word, but as the troublingly “unassumable” (Levinas 1988, 156) starting point for also potentially materializing the specific shape of its constitutive context. Rather than accepting the relegation of felt knowledge as fundamentally tainted and capable of only reproductively “revealing” an “unassailable” vision of the world (Scott 1991, 797), I want instead to risk working with felt evidence as a collaborative and suggestive seedbed for further research engagement. I also reject the implication that interpretive and descriptive accounts of felt-experience are not critical or political; I reject that such accounts necessarily infer that “states of feeling are held to be more authentic than social or political processes” (Desjarlais 1997, 248) and that a description of felt-experience can only lead to the reproduction of the status quo. Felt evidence extends a potentially radical call for public recognition of and responsibility for homelessness. Knowledge of the felt begins to

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open “those who are not themselves in pain” to “those who are” (Scarry 1985, 6). If the felt dimension of homelessness remains unnamed, it remains foreign, effaced, and without a response. As Butler (2004, 150) suggests, “If those lives remain unnameable and ungrievable, if they do not appear in their precariousness and their destruction, we will not be moved.” Here is the imperative of naming “nameless sufferings,” even in a necessarily approximate way (Levinas 1988, 159). What is homelessness as felt? What is its lived weight and embodied texture? In whatever partial or stuttering way, how can it be named? How might the feeling, homeless body itself “talk back” to dominant research and policy discourses of homelessness (Howson and Inglis 2001, 302)? What call might the feeling, homeless body itself make to its political community, to you? Research Felt and Lived Having suggested that epistemologically and ethically homelessness as felt needs greater exploration, my consequent struggle is one of making clear methodologically how it is that one can come to know the feltexperiences of homeless others. Outside of the constraints of thesis writing and project reporting where I have variously described my methodological approach as ethnographic and biographic and my research methods as participant observation and interviewing, I start to think more broadly here about the multiple ways in which the material and sentient capacities of my researching body have contributed to the knowability of homelessness as felt. I want to suggest that the kind of bodily knowledge building that goes on through corporeal research encounters—such as those involved in participant observation and interviewing—enables a privileged engagement with the felt-experience of others and thus speaks of the critical methodological challenge integral to the epistemological one I have also called for. In other words, the epistemological challenge to remaking homelessness as also a felt-experience necessarily relies upon a related methodological challenge to the forms of evidence currently admissible in homelessness research and policy. As already intimated though, not only is subjective, experiential evidence offered by research subjects seen to sit at cross-purposes with the

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rigor and scope of policy development, but as Scott (1991, 790) has argued, the knowledge produced by researchers based on “‘experience’ in the archives” or “‘experience’ as a participant observer” can be understood to be problematically reproductive. Further, “simple” claims to experience as transparent and “truthful” evidence have obscured, according to James Clifford (1988, 34–35), the creation and transformation of experience into evidence. If research relying on experiential evidence is practically, politically, and analytically limited, what then can be made of the research project that remains rooted in the evidence worked through the unpredictable researching body? What kind of knowledge and analytical scope does knowledge gleaned through the researching body guarantee? While some would make the use of researchers’ experiential evidence redundant as a naïve intellectual and political faux-pas, I wonder if the possibility of such evidence must always be discarded. How might experience be rethought rather than cast aside? What might the polluted possibilities of experience be? I take Clifford’s (1988, 54) remarks that experiential authority might be thought of as neither “obsolete” nor “pure” as the starting point for exploring how experience might be acknowledged as one productive evidence base for knowledge claims without making simplistic claims on truth, without assuming that intersubjectivity must necessarily be collapsed in any claim on experience, and perhaps most importantly, without continuing to reproduce the idea that experience engages a nondiscursive reality. What would it mean, for instance, to think of researchers’ experience not as pure evidence of reality but as the product of a corporeal entanglement with reality, a cultural inscription, as Vicky Kirby (1997, 4) suggests, which is not simply “received” by the body but takes place through the body, because of the body? How might experiential evidence be understood as the result of a kind of corporeal reading and writing (and again I am thinking here of Kirby’s work), a sensory, relational interpellation in which the researching body plays an active, intelligent, sensemaking role? How might “the individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it)” (Scott 1991, 777) be revisited and picked over as a “body of evidence,” as an “articulate and uncannily

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thoughtful” (Kirby 1997, 5) source of whole bodily and alternative forms of knowing? If, as Michael Polanyi (1966, 15) argues, “our body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical,” then already in the moment of fieldwork interaction my relating, experiencing, participating body is reading and writing research evidence, extending toward and into evidence, becoming evidence. It is not possible, nor in my interests, to try and reach beyond such a messy mingling, to imagine a moment of total, clean identification between subject and object. My very bodily exposure and somatic capacity underwrite what “counts” as evidence. Experience then names the very gap between reality and evidence: experience articulates the very possibility of evidence. How then could experience be avoided “as a unifying source of authority in the field” (Clifford 1988, 35) or “in the archives” (Scott 1991, 782–83)? And if it cannot be avoided, then how can experience be usefully rethought not as the falsified operation of a “pure” encounter, but as a grubby, gritty, felt polyphony given necessary, though partial, unity in the feeling, writing body? What kind of evidence can the researching, experiencing body offer as a knowing and writing tool? To what unique imaginary of homelessness might the researching body contribute? What does homelessness look like through the researching body? In particular, in what ways can the felt dimension of homelessness be known through the researching body? As I discuss in chapter 1, I use an approximation of Kirby’s (1989, 119) term “corporeography” to give shape to a methodological approach prioritizing the corporeal engagements central to both ethnography and biography. As a research strategy, corporeography names a specific dual interest in the bodily and emotional experiences of others and in the knowledgemaking capacities of the researching body itself. Corporeography explicitly positions the reflexive physical, emotional and sensory learnings of the researcher as pivotal to the study of the felt-experiences of others. This firm placing of the engaged and impacted body at the research site disrupts the delineation and exoticism of the research field and research participant. In corporeography the researching body itself can become a field site, a site of analysis, as it is remade, reshaped by research experience.

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Corporeography frames the ways in which the researching body is both indelibly inscribed by yet also inscribes the felt-experiences of others. In chapter 1, I work to make the resonant researching body clearer as a potential and perhaps essential tool in tracing the “invisible geography” (Scarry 1985, 3) of homelessness as felt. In corporeography, the body is put to work as a somatic register, a “memory pad,” to recall Bourdieu (2000, 141), strategically emplaced not simply to experientially blot up a phenomenon but to actively extend into it, to see it, to hear it, to touch it, to taste it, to smell it, to feel it. The body itself then is understood to be literally a “sensable” and sense-making tool of research, a sentient data recorder that constructs and records research evidence through experience. Corporeography relies on “an artful use of a vast sensorium of bodily resources” (Thrift 2004, 60) but also on its own “re-markability” as a “scene of writing” in itself (Kirby 1997, 154). It is this inscription by the felt-experiences of others as a significant research tool that needs closer articulation within qualitative research generally and specifically in relation to my own work. What is learned through such empathetic corporeal exchange, which includes but goes beyond what those terms of distance—participant observation, interviewing—suggest? I want to think more about the process in which my researching body itself might become a sentient pupil of how homelessness is felt and lived and, thus, become a vehicle through which to evidence the intensely emanating distress of those homeless. What does the researcher gain from a bodily encounter with the felt, for example, that might enable her to give voice to it? How does her listening, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, feeling body contribute to her knowledge of the felt, to her capacity to represent it? Displacement Felt and Lived Corporeal engagement gives rise to one avenue through which to struggle for the admissibility and “grievability” (Butler 2004, xviii) of homelessness as felt. The bodily knowledge of both researcher and researched offers a significant disruption to “the narrowness of many definitions which have focused on the accommodational aspects of homelessness overlooking its emotional dimension” (Nunan and Johns 1996, 75). In particular I suggest

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that the feeling, researching body is crucial in registering and evidencing the “sentient distress” (Scarry 1985, 6) that marks persistent homelessness as a state of long-term woundedness, rather than as a long-term absence of appropriate accommodation. The “unsharability” of sentient distress and “its resistance to language” (ibid., 4), however, troubles the task of the wider representation of homelessness as felt. The project of making felt homelessness visible faces epistemological and methodological challenges and also the theoretical challenge of making explicit not simply that homelessness is felt, but of more precisely naming how it is felt. Specifically, I need an expressive analytical language through which to externalize homelessness as felt, to hold its visceral form, to piece out both its bodily impact and how this impact is lived. Such an insistence on the necessity to “stay close” (Tuan 1975, 151) to felt-experience is critical when as Elaine Scarry (1985, 22) suggests, preempting Butler, that the derealization of sentient experience is understood as a political “technique of vanishment” (Schlunke 2005, 208) of already marginal subjectivities, and further, when the successful expression of pain is intimately linked to its elimination (Scarry 1985, 11). Scarry’s focus, like Butler’s, is on the effacement of human subjects in physical pain in the contexts of war and torture, and though I do not share her easy isolation of the physical within felt-experience, her emphasis on the strategic potential of the derealization of bodily sufferance makes urgent the intervention its materialization represents. Scarry (ibid., 13) highlights the need “to coax pain into visibility,” to remake, reimage, reflesh what has been an experience perhaps usefully objectified—as in body counts (ibid., 70)—but only objectified and thus separated from its felt-site—the body subject—in the world. Such visibility requires not only epistemological and methodological ruptures with dominant approaches to knowing but requires a transformative language both analytical and open to lingering infusion by the materiality and singularity of suffering. In holding on to the felt-site of the body in describing pain, it is first the language of those who have experienced pain in which Scarry locates the possibility of fleshing out sentient distress. Through interaction with the “verbal fragments” those who have experienced pain utter,

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Scarry (ibid., 6) suggests that one may come to richly witness and understand not only pain but “the human capacity for word-making” itself. For Scarry (ibid., 6), “To witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the pre-language of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language; but conversely, to be present when a person moves up out of that pre-language and projects the facts of sentience into speech is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of language itself.” In the context of my research, I have worked closely with individuals who have been or who are in pain and also with “those who are not themselves in pain but who speak on behalf of those who are,” in whom Scarry (ibid., 6) also places the hope of making pain articulate. I also draw on the site of my own body as an articulate witness to the pain of others in the verbal and written representations of homelessness I continue to make. A range of languages of distress—those of homeless people, of support workers and advocates who speak on their behalf, and my own—has emerged through the course of my research. I imagine each to make possible the expressibility of the other. In this book, alongside my own research experiences, I draw in particular on the fragments of young homeless people’s speech, born through and embedded in the intersubjective, intercorporeal engagement of field research. In reexamining my fieldwork for the ways in which felt narratives flow thematically through it, I bring together thirty-five indepth interviews undertaken with young people as part of my doctoral research and nine biographic interviews undertaken with young people as part of my research on homelessness and mental disorders. This body of selected fieldwork includes interviews with forty-six young homeless people aged sixteen to twenty-six, of whom twenty-nine were male and seventeen female. Though there is much in my discussion of this interview material that is specific to trajectories of youth homelessness, I want also to assert from the outset that the central felt-experiences of homelessness I identify here are integral to experiences of homeless people of all ages. Certainly in the more extensive body of fieldwork from the AHURI project, which included homeless men and women aged fourteen to sixty-three years old, though the same felt affects of homelessness were lived and negotiated in

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different ways, they nonetheless repetitively featured across the range of participants’ life paths (see Robinson, 2003a). Alongside a reflection on my research encounters, it is bringing the selected interview material together with theoretical languages also focusing on the vulnerable and distressed body that significantly assists my project of naming the felt dimension of homelessness. Drawing on psychobiology, phenomenology, and sociology I rethink homelessness as displacement, as a series of dislocations through which young homeless people continue to lose housing but also, and more profoundly, their bodily integrity, their existential orientation, and their habitual resources. To be homeless, I argue, is to be displaced, to be beside one’s self in trauma, grief, fear, and anger. It is from being displaced that trajectories of homelessness stem. My shift to displacement reflects my search for “that language [which] communicates the precariousness of life” (Butler 2004, 139), for a language that captures the felt impacts of dislocation from community, home, self, and body that those experiencing trajectories of persistent homelessness so often endure. This shift also reflects my determination to “tarry,” as Butler (2004, 30) suggests, with the grief of homelessness, to begin the process of trying to hold onto the weight, texture, and complexity of what it is to feel homelessness as an important tool in both questioning and shaping responses to homelessness. I argue for the reinsertion of felt-experience into knowing homelessness not in order to reinforce falsely polarized debates about subjective and objective definitions of homelessness but to try to keep fluid the field of evidence that might inform understandings of homelessness. My move into the experiential and theoretical terrains of displacement can be thought of as an attempt to expand the borders of how homelessness is known, to push out the frame that dictates what will and will not “count” in representing homelessness. I offer conceptualizations of different dimensions of displacement as an intervention into both how homelessness usually comes to be known and how homelessness usually comes to be represented. In Desjarlais’s (2005, 370) terms, chapters 2, 3, and 4 offer a “redescription” of homelessness from “a sensory-centered perspective—one that offers an analytic take on homelessness that is distinct

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from the medical and purely political-economic models that have tended to dominate the literature on this subject.” I explore in turn the corporeal, geographical, and social roots of displacement, tracing out the key felt narratives of disembodiment, dislocation, and discordance that centrally shape the life paths of many young homeless people. Though a powerful language of displacement felt and lived by young people is forged in these chapters, it is a language also interwoven with resilient practices of place making and healing. Young homeless people seek respite and recovery and also fight for corporeal, geographical, and social “implacement” (Casey 1993, 3), however partial or temporary this may be. As I come to discuss in the book’s conclusion, however, it is both the devastating feelings of dislocation and the sometimes extreme and damaging measures young homeless people take to assuage them that reinforce the ethical, political, and practical necessity of remaking homelessness. There is a pressing need to communicate an understanding of homelessness as an affective state, to use homelessness as a term that describes the felt-experience of multiple displacements, of deep traumatization and geographical and social isolation. Such understandings have the potential to reach differently into public consciousness and not only demand a response but suggest responses only poorly imagined on the basis of current forms of representation. Pivotal to keeping open the ethical call of homelessness is a continued challenge to the “policy-relevant movement” that assumes that “emotional relations . . . [do] not substantially infuse the public/policy sphere” (Anderson and Smith 2001, 7). Responding to homelessness might yet rely on the felt as both a mode and terrain for knowing.

1 Corporeography Sensing the Other Something gets under my skin. —Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity

In t h is ch a p t er, I aim to give a fuller account of the way in which I think my gut feelings about homelessness have formed through corporeal engagement. I do so as a disruption to social scientific approximations of homelessness and with an insistence that engagement in methodological debate and development is central to also addressing the widely acknowledged theoretical paucity of the field of homelessness research. I also aim to account for corporeal engagement foreseeing discomfort with my positive assessment of the affective knowledge capacities of the researching body. My central claim is that, over time, I have built a bodily knowledge of felt homelessness; I have built a slow corporeal register of being-without-place. Through being there in homeless places and being with homeless people, through being tangled up in homelessness, I have developed a corporeal comprehension of how it is felt and lived. I seek to account in more detail here for the possibility of such corporeal comprehension, for how it might be engendered. Following Michael Jackson (1989, 3), I move to further “clarify the ways in which knowledge is grounded in practical, personal and participatory experience in the field.” I want to unravel the fragile possibilities 23

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of experiential, bodily knowledge, whatever limits to knowing such “bodily engagings” (Laurier and Parr 2000, 100) also imply. I return to the dangerous territory of claiming to know the experiences of others as a justification for speaking on their behalf, and as such, to the “self-legitimation” (Kirby 1993, 25) embedded in the practice of ethnographic research. In particular, I reconsider the possibilities of experiential authority, of claiming “I was there” and had a “‘feel’ for” homelessness (Clifford 1988, 35). Such claims to the researcher’s own felt-experience as a basis for knowledge are dangerous in that they have been understood, at best, to naïvely obscure the ideological constitution of experience (Scott 1991, 778), to be potentially “self-indulgent” (Parr 2005, 479) in giving primacy to researchers’ rather than research participants’ experiences (Widdowfield 2000, 202), to be “anti-theoretical” and “anti-intellectual” (Grosz 1993, 207), and certainly to unreflexively assume the direct availability of one’s own experience (Kirby 1993, 30; Rose 1997, 309). In a context in which legitimated knowledge has evolved as “abstract and reductively derived knowledge” (Lawler 1991, 226), and efforts to establish the alternative value of experiential knowledge have been seen to repeat authoritative claims to truthful and valid representation, being there and being with remain doubly contested as knowledge-production processes. As Jocalyn Lawler (ibid., 225–27) suggests, given the paucity of investigations of experiential knowledges—a function of their fundamental devaluation as disturbingly unscientific and specifically as women’s knowledges—not only do such knowledges remain relatively silenced and “privatised” and their critical capacity “to demonstrate the shortcomings of positivist patterns of enquiry” curtailed, but the documentation of what is experiential knowledge remains underdeveloped. This is a situation, without excusing poor accounts of knowledge production, which lends itself to intellectual clumsiness and, further still, is a situation not helped by the emergent, “unpredictable, uncontrollable” (Okely 2007, 77) nature of affective bodily knowledges that thus “exceed representability” (Bondi 2005, 438). “How do we write emotion?” ask Eric Laurier and Hester Parr (2000, 100). The necessary struggle for the articulation in research of the “utility or otherwise” of bodily knowledge, including “emotional resources”

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(Wilkins 1993, 97), continues to lead to the development of new and useful methodological vocabulary. It is to the growing range of ways of making critical sense of emotional and corporeal knowing that I aim to contribute here. In reemploying Kirby’s (1989, 119) term “corporeography” in this chapter, I echo Lawler’s (1991) use of “somology,” a term she introduces in an attempt to address the legitimacy issues faced by “nurses’ knowledge.” According to Lawler, nurses’ knowledge, in particular nurses’ holistic sensation of patients’ bodily experiences and needs, stems from the corporeal practice of nursing itself. For Lawler, the practical, nursing body is the central tool and possibility of the communication of the felt and lived bodily experiences of others, and yet the critical knowledge nurses’ intimate engagement with patients gives rise to is silenced in a context in which medicalized knowledge specifically fragmenting bodily experience is privileged in health care delivery and research (Lawler 1997, 32). Lawler uses the term somology to name and give better sense and profile to the process through which nurses develop knowledge of other bodies using their own. Likewise I deploy the term corporeography to begin to point to the complex bodily inscriptions through which researchers may come to register and reinscribe a multimodal knowledge of other bodies using their own. For researchers’ bodily knowledge, like nurses’, has been traditionally silenced and undervalued in both academic and public policy realms, and those knowledges more easily understood and represented as rigorous or scientific have instead been privileged. Corporeography—as an approach to research that has at its core a muddle of corporeal, emotional, and sensorial knowing—certainly represents then a significant methodological challenge for social research undertaken and utilized within both academic and public policy arenas. This is a methodological challenge that necessarily flows from the epistemological one I have already called for. I called for a consideration of felt homelessness, and here I argue that it is through “somatic modes of attention” (Csordas 1993) that the felt might be made admissible. It is through empathetic bodily “resonance” (Wikan 1992, 460), through bodily inscription and inhabitation by felt homelessness, that its weight and texture might be approximated. What I want to explore in this chapter is more precisely how the bodysubject can become a unique gauging tool of the felt and thus the tool at

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the center of this methodological discussion. My argument is that knowledge of the felt-experiences of others can come through the capacity of the lived-body for sentient, relational reciprocity and recognition, that bodysubjects can come to know the feelings of others through their own bodies, through using the capacities of their own bodies for interacting, feeling and sensing their way into others’ felt sphere. I see the lived-body as capable of multiple forms of “uncannily thoughtful” (Kirby 1997, 5) and reflexive “body talk” (Parr 2001, 161) through which it negotiates ways of being there with others. I understand the lived-body as capable of sensory, emotional, intellectual, and physical “compassionate connection” with others (Leder 1990, 163). I understand the lived-body as having multiple sensory avenues through which to construct data about and extend into the feltexperiences of others; multiple mediums for sensing, knowing, analyzing, and evidencing are given cross-modal coherence in the lived-body. The lived-body is a powerful somatic register open to the potentially radical inscriptions of the felt. Corporeography as a methodology frames a focus on researching subjective, felt-experience through researchers’ enduring capacity for bodily engagement in and by the field. I use the term corporeography to articulate the central methodological process of bodily “prospecting” (Merleau-Ponty in Shotter 2004, 451), of using the body as a tool to move out among, register, and sift through the experiences of others. I devise three dimensions of corporeographic knowing: reflexive incorporation in the field, felt empathetic identification with research participants’ experiences, and a sensual occupation of and awareness in the field. Through interaction, through feeling, through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, the researcher opens her body to inhabitation by the field and thus learns to find her place there also. In turn, this bodily embeddedness becomes a basis for analyzing as well as producing fieldwork. Liz Bondi (2005, 242–43; see also Wilkins, 1993, 96) argues, for example, that emotions are “interpretive” and “analytic resources,” and Judith Okely (2007, 77) likewise confirms that “making sense of fieldwork is also a bodily process. The writer recognises themes and sorts out what seemed incomprehensible puzzles because she can feel it in her bones and flesh.”

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Heidi Nast (1998, 111) also draws attention to the analytical capacities of the researching body: “The body-as-place registers as it maps out othernesses of person and place.” The very mappability, the very malleability of the body underwrites the possibility of its own cartographic and sonographic productions. The unique inscriptive and resonant qualities of sentient flesh precisely enable it to record and write felt geographies. I do not mean to suggest, however, that attempts to know “othernesses” relying on embodied interaction with others are unproblematic or always possible and successful or indeed that knowledge of the felt-experience of others can only come through forms of intersubjective, corporeal comprehension. Parr (2001, 165) points out that “it is unrealistic to suggest that all social research can be founded on intersubjectivity,” and as Rahel Wasserfall’s (1997) work shows there are considerable obstacles to reflexively forming a sense of intersubjective connectedness in research. “How do I represent a group of people with whom I had strong conflict, whom I disliked and from whom I felt alienated?” asks Wasserfall (ibid., 154). There may indeed be instances in which bodily connectedness with others is impossible, inappropriate, or even dangerous and in which the researcher’s perceptive capacities fail. As Scarry (1985, 278) discusses, the very possibility of successfully representing the painful experiences of others, for example, is specifically fraught not only because language falters in the face of pain, but because “our powers of perception” needed in “the elementary task of identifying, descriptively, what is taking place” can become desensitized, particularly in the context of exposure to relentless pain. For Scarry (ibid., 279), “As physical pain destroys the mental content and language of the person in pain, so it also tends to appropriate and destroy the conceptualization abilities and language of persons who only observe pain.” Further still, Stacey L. Sinclair and Gerald Monk (2005) call for the more general consideration of the potentially damaging presumed universality or sharability of experience. In their consideration of empathetic, therapeutic relationships they argue for a widening of fundamentally humanistic conceptions of empathy to include “discursive empathy”—an empathy focused on a critical awareness of others’ sociocultural positionings. Such

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discursive awareness intervenes, Sinclair and Monk (ibid., 337) suggest, in the unhelpful collusion of counselors with their clients’ perspectives and feelings—an approach that has importance for the self-reflexive operation of empathy in research relationships too. I am not arguing then that the knowing body is automatically or always opened to the felt-experience of others, but neither will I back away from my sense that it can be. I am determined to think through how embodied understanding or resonance might provide alternative forms of corporeographic knowledge, knowledge written through the body, which may intervene in how a particular issue comes to be understood, represented, and responded to. As Scott (1994, 399–400) suggests, different life experiences give rise to different knowledges and as such can also open onto a perhaps more profound and extensive exposure of the contested and localized nature of knowing. Thus, a corporeographic approach is both suggestive of new bodily evidences through which to understand homelessness, and also, though in ways different to those imagined by Scott, implies a critical questioning of the ways in which research and policy knowledge of homelessness has solidified at the expense of the felt dimension. The possibility of making sentient distress visible “on behalf of” those in pain centrally depends on the empathetic capacities of bodies without pain. Despite the multiple obstacles faced in the use of the witnessing body as a knowledge tool discussed above, I hold firmly onto its emotional, corporeal, sensorial capacity to approximate the felt. Despite its fallibility, despite the always partial and approximate nature of its comprehension of the bodies of others, it is in the lived-body that I seek expression of the felt and of the pain of displacement in particular. For this lived-body is not doomed to “only observe pain” (Scarry 1985, 279), to be only numb to the pain of others, but is also a body with a capacity to be wholly connected to and inhabited by the pain of others. It is in this possibility of the intersubjective, intercorporeal connectedness of compassionate bodies that I also locate the possibility of a recognition of pain. It is the suggestive capacity of bodies to inhabit each other (the “ethic of embodiment” that Drew Leder [1990 160] thinks of?) in which I place the hope of the grievability of homelessness as felt.

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I now move to trace in more detail some of the ways in which I have both “crafted” (Coffey 1999, 23) and “come into” (Wolff 1976, 21) a reflexive, empathetic and multisensory engagement with felt homelessness that underwrites the analyses of displacement that I unfold in the following chapters. I start with a discussion of the extensive reflexive “body work” (Coffey 1999, 66) through which I began to negotiate a sense of corporeal emplacement and belonging in the homelessness sector and open constructive communicative relations with homeless people and agency staff in particular. I extend Nast’s (1998, 95) work on the necessary “giving over” of the body in reflexive fieldwork by exploring my often uncontrolled experiences of “empathetic identification” (Leder 1990, 161) in research interviews. I then make more detailed my account of bodily knowledge by exploring my sensuous presence in the field. I try to capture some of the sensitive, “perceptual engagements” (Feld 2005, 181) that centrally underpinned and enabled my development of a reflexive and empathetic inhabitation of the field. Finally, I think through the drawback of corporeographic research of the felt as the problematic, often indelible exposure to trauma, though I argue too that the very permeability of the researcher to the sentient distress of others is the basis for a resonant expression of homelessness felt and lived. Reflexivity An accommodation worker at a youth refuge noted, at the conclusion of my PhD fieldwork, “You’ve become part of the furniture here, you can’t leave.” My return to this refuge as a relief youth accommodation worker for a further two years was the first clear signal of my enduring corporeal enmeshment in the field of homelessness. Though I am now significantly drawn back into the different bodily space of academia, I feel the bodily “echo” (Leder 1990, 162) of the displaced places of homelessness and feel keenly my corporeal difference effected by them. The bodily incorporation of, or becoming part of the furniture of homelessness, part of the displaced places of refuges, drop-in centers, meal vans, and backstreets has been an extreme experience that has required of me a changed corporeality and a changed corporeal capacity. I have come to occupy myself in new ways.

30 | Beside One’s Self Through a continually reflexive process of corporeally “registering and negotiating difference” (Nast 1998, 107)—my own and others’—I learned over time how to shape myself in the multiple ways required to sustain a research presence in the homelessness sector. I had to learn how to read other bodies and places, I had to learn how to read how other bodies read mine, and I had to work at reinscribing the ways in which I presented myself in response to the demands, expectations, and immediate compulsions of the spatial and interactional structure of field. As a basis for beginning fieldwork in refuges and drop-in centers, I had to learn how to literally, corporeally occupy what was unfamiliar territory. I had to learn how to position myself so I looked comfortable, confident, and approachable when I was often under extreme stress or still learning what kind of habituated way of being was required of me by the physical and emotional geographies of the homelessness sector. As Coffey (1999, 73) suggests, “at a very simple level, the ethnographer has to sit, stand or lie or be somewhere. . . . A space has to be made, or found, for the bodythereness of the ethnographer.” The process of reflexively and corporeally responding to the various and often contradictory structures of the field was a continuous and crucial form of experiential fieldwork. Fieldwork was body work, and body work was a process of “knowledge building through embodiment” (Parr 2001, 162), or more precisely, reembodiment (Okely 2007, 65). Through cultural and spatial exposure, through corporeal inscription, I was “recast” (Coffey 1999, 25); I was repositioned by the field, adjusted in behavior and bodily comportment. As Nast (1998, 107–8) likewise discusses, through registering and “responding to how others called upon me and how others defined the terms of engagement,” I developed the bodily and emotional skills necessary to enable continued communicative interaction in the field. At the same time, I learned “materially” (ibid., 94) or practically (Jackson 1983, 340), through my body, of some of the physical, emotional, and sensorial demands of living homeless. Reflexive skills of self- and body-management, of body “making” (Parr 2001, 161), were central, for example, in establishing my professional capacity with support and accommodation agency managers and staff who were the key gatekeepers of the homelessness field, in presenting

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a nonthreatening, welcoming researcher-self to homeless people, and in ensuring my own street-savvy safety by understanding the range of spatial contexts I moved through, each of which required different forms of bodily alertness. I undertook such reflexive reinscriptions of my bodily self not on the basis of a reflection on how I understood my “location of self” (Hertz 1997, viii) in the field, however, but on the basis of an often involuntary reflexivity, a reflexivity that had me scrambling to understand and negotiate the ways in which the field placed me in ways unexpected and even undesired. Rather than a controlled, self-directed reflexivity, following Nast (1998, 94), I was firmly engaged in a “creatively decentering” other-directed reflexivity. As Nast (ibid.) argues, “Reflexivity is less about self-introspection, self reflection . . . than about learning to recognise others’ construction of us through their initiatives, spaces, bodies, judgement, prescriptions, proscriptions and so on.” Participant observation in the homelessness sector was central to my experience of reflexive, other-directed learning. As Jackson (1983, 340) also suggests, “To participate bodily in everyday practical tasks was a creative technique that often helped me grasp the sense of an activity by using my body as others did.” I learned from my interaction with both agency staff and homeless people, developing the kind of tough body expected in this field, a tough body that communicated respect, stability, consistency, and a strong, professional awareness of appropriate bodily, emotional, and geographical boundaries. My academic interests and competency needed downplaying. I had to show I could “handle myself,” that I wouldn’t “lose my head” or “break down.” I had to be able to “hold my own,” “stand up for myself” and not get “rattled.” I had to show that I had “good boundaries,” that I was safe, sensible, and firm but that I wasn’t “stuck up,” that I could have fun, joke around, “cop it on the chin,” and “give as good as I got.” In particular, I had to show that I could earn the trust of homeless clients—often the hardest and most astute judges of character—thus seemingly demonstrating that my engagement was genuine and thoughtful. My development of this corporeal style of generous robustness, of likeable toughness, taught me a lot about the fragility of agency workers and their homeless clients. Through working hard to cope with everyday interaction in refuges and drop-ins I learned of the extreme physical and

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emotional stress both agency staff and homeless people were under and of the difficulties of negotiating the body-self in often intimidating and always public environments. Toughness was needed by all to get by. It was needed to manage the constant physical, emotional, and sensorial bombardment of the chaos of living homeless. It was needed to shield against the exhaustion of public living, of hanging around, often cold and uncomfortable, with time passing slowly. It was needed in particular to bear the weight of constant exposure to other people’s sadness, anger, illness, and shame. Toughness brought respect and guarded against fear. The acquisition of a tough body was also a process of registering and negotiating the ways in which both agency staff and homeless people positioned me and each other as physically and emotionally “in danger” and a process of learning about homelessness as a spatial context of threat that could be corporeally managed by being streetwise to a certain extent. I was warned by agency staff about “burn out” and the need to regularly debrief with someone about the often traumatic interactions and interview content I was exposed to. I was taught by both staff and homeless people to “watch my back” and to be sensible about my safety within refuges and drop-ins, such as by trying to steer clear of people if they became aggressive and by making sure I avoided being alone with clients in private or secluded places, such as bedrooms or parts of buildings out of earshot, eyesight, or surveillance camera range. I was instructed to understand that my body was at constant risk from needle-stick injury in particular and became competent at routinely taking this into account when choosing where to sit and when handling clothing, bags, and handbags that did not belong to me. Perhaps most revealingly, it was also reinforced to me through my interactions with homeless people that I too, as an unknown stranger, was positioned as a potential physical and emotional threat. I learned of homeless people’s repeated experiences of sexual, physical, and emotional trauma through being understood by staff and homeless people as a potential violator myself and through having to negotiate this potentiality by developing new embodiment skills. I had to learn to present myself as someone safe, accepting and nonjudgmental, as someone in whom agency staff had confidence, and as someone sensitively attuned

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to the generalized context of trauma underpinning homelessness and to the very specific ways in which this context played out in the everyday interactions of those living homeless. My negotiations with research participants of public interview locations was as much for interviewees’ well-being as my own, as was the postinterview support provided by agency staff. Although the “tough persona” was crucial for being there in the marginal spaces of refuges and drop-ins, in my extended or intensive interactions with homeless people, such as during interviews, I also had to work to re-create a different professional competency and persona connected to the conduct of my research. I needed to learn the interactions of toughness to survive and “fit in,” and I needed to materially demonstrate that I was “sound,” but I also needed to craft ways of being with homeless people that were relevant to my non-agency-related role in the field. Being with required a different form of interactive relationship and intimacy in order to conduct qualitative in-depth and biographic interviews focusing on subjective, felt, and lived experiences. Homeless people were overly used to the interview as a brief summary undertaken by staff of the key issues they currently faced on their initial presentation to services for accommodation or assistance. An “intake interview” consisted of a blunt, matter-of-fact discussion about a client’s referral to an agency (which usually lead to a “background check” with a previous agency contact), state and foster care history, physical and mental health, drug and alcohol usage (what, and how much daily?), selfharm, and legal issues. Homeless people were also used to various forms of “therapeutic interviews” undertaken by agency staff and other professionals involved in the welfare sector such as psychologists, educators, drug and alcohol rehabilitation counselors, support group leaders, legal aid lawyers, and mental health and health practitioners. In my research, then, I had to clearly establish the interview as neither necessarily therapeutic nor inquisitional but as aimed at the recognition of participants’ experiences. In the opening moments of an interview, I found it was my framing of interaction to which participants had to initially respond. I moved respondents into a terrain of talk directed by the particular project focus and into a form of interaction directed by the

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formal protocols of ethical interviewing and sound recording, and yet also suggested to participants that they too could control the interview. I tried to reinforce that I wanted to learn from participants about their experiences of living homeless, and yet this attempt to share control of the interview nonetheless assumed that life-narratives could and would be made accessible to me by participants. Frustratingly, I was clumsy and respondents were inevitably on the back foot at the start of an interview, and I had to work hard to draw them forward again using every reflexive bodily skill available to me. The intensity of this kind of interaction was extreme; I recall my researching body at times straining to sense in detail the particular ways respondents needed me to be with them in order to feel safe, heard, and valued in the research setting. I had to work to make myself alert not simply to what was being said but to the differing spatial and corporeal positioning and interactive needs of each participant. Is it best to sit outside? Does the interviewee want someone else present? Should we make a coffee together first? How do I give comfort here? Should I interject with another question, or just let things roll? Despite my awkward and necessarily uncertain representation of what participation in a research interview might entail, and despite the reinforcement of the specific subject positions of researcher and researched during the formalities of negotiated consent in particular, through reflexive body work it was also possible to create a context of connection, calm, and emotional safety. Further, as I now move on to discuss, the corporeal connection often (though not always) worked up through interview interaction came not just through other-directed reflexive body work but through the radical “scope for confusion between self and other” (Bondi 2003, 64) offered by the unique and intense exchange of interviews. Through reflexively giving myself over to the inscriptions of others, I in turn also kept open the possibility of an empathetic incorporation of the subjective experiences recounted by research participants during interviews. In other words, and as Nast (1998, 96) argues, the “formational experiences” of reflexive fieldwork “led me both to greater subjective de-centering and fragmentation and to an enlarged experiential field of difference.”

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Empathy Although the often enormous biographic and experiential differences between me and research participants with experiences of homelessness or homelessness and mental illness might be expected to mitigate against our resonant interaction, with Bondi I want to think more about empathy as a key method for building understanding across both similarity and difference. I want to think in particular about the process of empathetic “resonance” (Wikan 1992) involved in interviews as another important corporeographic route through which I came to know the felt dimension of homelessness. Bondi very usefully explores the psychic work involved in empathetic interviewing, mobilizing concepts such as identification, introjection, and projection to demystify the process of intersubjective exchange and explain psychoanalytically how it is that understanding between interviewer and interviewee can be developed. I extend her exploration of empathy, however, wanting to make sense of my more generalized experience of empathetic bodily resonance—“a feeling-thinking engagement” (Wikan 1992, 476) at once the result of the psychic and physical work— as central in empathetic interviewing exchange. I take up Drew Leder’s (1990) work on compassion to help me place the body more firmly within empathy as tool for knowing the felt. Bondi suggests that general psychological processes of subject formation are integral for the intersubjective exchanges central in empathetic knowing or understanding. In the often intimate and intense exchange of interviewing, Bondi (2003, 70) contends, “Something of the inner reality of one person is not only communicated to another person, but is actively incorporated into the inner reality of that other person.” For Bondi, this empathetic communication is a result of psychic processes of identification: through introjection, the subject unconsciously draws on elements of the ways of being of others and their experiences in their own identity formation, and through projection, the subject unconsciously projects or expels often unwanted elements of their own psychic identifications onto others. In the context of interviewing, such “intersubjective transactions” (ibid.) are central in the process of understanding others because

36 | Beside One’s Self they represent a capacity to imaginatively and creatively share in others’ experiences and feelings, whether through the researcher’s unconscious “absorption” of or learning about others through an introjective inscription of their manner and experience, or through the researcher’s gathering of his or her own experiential resources in a projective inscription of experiences of others. That interviewer and interviewee both in fact become active participants in the interview is crucial to the development of intersubjective understanding. As indicated above, however, I also want to think about the corporeal participation that similarly gives rise to the possibility of empathetic communication. I want to hold on to my sense of a whole bodily ingestion of the experiences of others, of not just a cognitive identification with how others felt, but a sweaty, nauseating, head-aching, tearspilling, heart-scrambling, full-bodied incorporation. Incorporation is a word I want to stress here more than Bondi does in order to more clearly consider empathy as a process of corporeal identification with and inhabitation by the experiences of others. I want to suggest that again through the sentient capacities of the body, I engaged in an empathetic reinscription of my own corporeal experience and schema by extending into the experiences of research participants. Making myself “fully available to the interviewee” (ibid., 73) entailed not only reworking myself as nonthreatening, supportive, sensitive, and attentive in the eyes of each individual research participant, but also meant incorporating, including into my fleshy being, others’ felt-experiences of stress, grief, disorientation, and trauma. In short, following Bondi what I want to say is that I learned about homelessness as felt in part through confusing others’ emotional and physical trauma for my own. I experienced this confusion not just psychically, however, but corporeally. Though I could never anticipate whether or not an interview would give rise to such embodied empathetic confusion or when I might come into such confusion—at times it was retrospective—or in what way my feeling of confusion developed—conscious or unconscious—through my own changing emotional and physical state in specific interviews and more generally over the course of my research I came to think of understanding as a profoundly corporeal achievement. I

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came to recognize in my own body the ways in which I seemed to take on the slowness of sorrow, the curtness of anger, the carelessness of frustration, the sleeplessness of pain, the heartbeat of fear, the breathlessness of panic, and the disorientation of madness. I felt the shuddering grief in the back of my own throat; I felt the bodily echo of stepfathers’ hands between my own legs; I felt the blunt push of the needle in my own fingers, in my own neck, in the flat of my own forearm. Such corporeal resonances or “corporeal countertransference” (Csordas 1993, 145) took place both at the time of interviews and also over the course of my various research projects. My bodily incorporation of the experiences of others was both immediate and cumulative. I felt my way into the experiences of others by going “beyond the words” (Wikan 1992) and entering into an enlarged communicative field of corporeal confusion in which others’ experience took hold in my body and imagination. This is the corporeal reverberation that Wikan (ibid., 463) likewise points to: “I must create resonance in myself with the people and problems I seek to understand.” Leder’s (1990, 152) conceptualization of such empathetic identification as an operation of “embodied intelligence” unique to the lived body is useful for pointing to the epistemological and ethical value of compassionate embodiment. The devaluation and underdevelopment of forms of bodily knowing and communication reflect, according to Leder, the Cartesian neglect of the body. This is a neglect with epistemological, ethical, and political outcomes, including the stigmatization of bodies in specific socioeconomic, gendered, racialized, and anthropocentric ways. For Leder (ibid., 153) then, the “positive body awareness” at work in compassionate identification with others, represents an extremely significant intervention in this context of corporeal repression. The capacity and “propensity” (ibid., 159, italics added) of the body-subject for affective, “‘gut-level’ identification with the feelings of those around us” (ibid., 163) enacts and clearly demonstrates the inherent interconnection or permeability of bodies. “To form one body” in resonant understanding is “to assert the truth of relation” according to Leder (ibid., 162). Affectivity, as one mechanism of bodily knowledge, at once puts into question and intervenes in the necessary transcendence of rationalized

38 | Beside One’s Self forms of knowing, and as such represents a central tool for use by social researchers in everyday practices of embodied knowing and in contesting and critically evaluating both other knowledge content and other ways of knowing. Such affectivity and the possibilities of interconnected bodily knowing it betrays are made redundant, however, in most social research methodology literature. Interestingly, where such corporeal translocation is discussed, it is encapsulated in the strongest possible language of affect necessarily beyond traditional methodological terminology, namely, that of love. Kurt H. Wolff (1976, 20) talks of the “cognitive love” central to the process of surrendering to, and doing justice to, the experiences of both self and other, and Bourdieu (1999c, 614) similarly describes “intellectual love” as central to the “spiritual exercise” of understanding others: “The welcoming disposition, which leads one to make the respondent’s problem one’s own, the capacity to take that person and understand them just as they are in their distinctive necessity, is a sort of intellectual love.” As both Bondi (2003, 71) and Leder (1990, 162) are at pains to point out, however, such ecstatic incorporation of the experiences of others develops into empathy only through the recognition and communication of the singularity of the other’s experience. The incorporation of the experiences of others is cannibalistic, as Derrida (1991) suggests, but does not nor can it represent a complete consumption by the researcher of the researched, hence Derrida’s (114) consideration of the possibilities of “eating well.” Identification with others must always be considered as a messy process dogged by uncertainty, and, most importantly, as an “act of imagination” (Bondi 2003, 71, italics added). I do not claim that through coming to emotionally and physically inhabit what I thought were the distressed experiences of others I therefore came to know with exactness and directness the nature of their distress. Not only does the locatedness of my own body prevent “total identification” (Leder 1990, 162) with others, but my psychic and corporeal recognition of others is imagined, and the necessary limits of my imagination speak always of empathy as a relationship between differences, a “twoness” that moves toward “oneness.” In this context I understand Bourdieu’s and Wolff’s methodological use of the notion of love as an attempt to name the relationship of openness, permeability, and concern through which participation in and

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incorporation of the other’s experience might occur. As Bondi (2003, 72) also points out, however, in the context of the research interview “such immersion is typically interspersed with moments of taking stock in a more detached way.” Indeed, empathy as a feeling “for” the other, as a sense “for” the other requires the holding of the “concernful relation” (Leder 1990, 162) between self and other, and a critical awareness of the imaginative acts of recognition and representation. As such, and as I will discuss again shortly, empathy as a corporeographic research tool relies centrally on the capacity of the researcher to be beside herself. She must bear the contradictory imperatives of the ecstatic, relational body, being at once “alert to differences between self and other” while still being, often painfully, “emotionally present to the interviewee” (Bondi 2003, 71). Sensability In terms of making sense of the felt-experiences of homeless others through the practice of research, I have argued that “the sense of the other,” a sense of the meanings others generate, as Marc Augé (1998, xv) explains, can be developed through the process of sensing for others. I have considered how “the sense for the other, for otherness” (ibid.) might be engendered through reflexive body work and through empathetic identification— through feeling for homeless others. But what of the process of literally sensing others? What contribution to knowing might the sensory arts of the body make? Interestingly, in Augé’s consideration of it, “a sense for the other” does not include the literal, sensorial activities of the body. It seems crucial, however, to also foreground the sense made of others through the multimodal sensory capacities of the body. Needing interrogation in my own research practice, for example, is the epistemological impact of my perceptual body work in the field of homelessness. The final corporeographic research method I want to consider then is sensability. If, as Leder (1990, 1) suggests, “I receive the surrounding world through my eyes, my ears, my hands,” then I must account for how the felt-experiences of others might be approximated through the sensable extensions and resonances of my researching body. Indeed, considering how the field “absorbs also through the skin” (Okely 2007, 75) helps to further locate the psychological processes of introjection and

40 | Beside One’s Self projection that Bondi discusses. In corporeally enmeshing me with homeless others, sensory knowledge building provided the information crucial to my reflexive inhabitation of the field and to my engagement in the empathetic work of identification. I came into the felt dimension of homelessness through the often involuntary work of my senses. A powerful “synesthetic” (Feld 2005, 181) inscription continued to open my enlarged and deepened corporeal engagement with the felt. I made sense of the felt dimension of homelessness; through my senses my body was made alive to its instructive permeation by others. I want to clarify the different contributions made to practical comprehension by the specific sensory abilities of seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, and listening. I do this not by theoretically accounting for the epistemological value of each sense (see, for example, Rodaway 1994), but by reflecting on key fieldwork moments in which the epistemological value of particular senses seemed heightened. In the following sections, I try to demonstrate the muddled-up reflexive, empathetic, and sensorial fieldwork I conducted. I attempt to capture both the involuntary knowledge building and the sense-making intentionality of my feeling, living, researching body and to illustrate the whole-of-body knowing that takes place through sharing the physical, psychic, emotional, and sensorial space of the other. I also aim to bring together a fuller depiction of corporeography “in motion,” as a writing through the body, as a writing that comes to these pages both through my own body and through the bodies of others. Seeing The food van was a kind of troubling tour bus propelling me through the interstices of inner-city Sydney. That first night, I remember my eyes straining to make out giant moths (?) cocooned from the prying yellow headlights of the van as it swung around into Tom Uren Square. The shock of it: at least fifty people blanketed under the railway overpass and building awnings. A couple’s socked feet tangled out from under a cardboard screen. Broken chairs leaned in conversationally, a double bed base slept three and a watchful blue heeler. A mantelpiece arranged with trinkets and pictures nestled in a section of indented bricking. “At least I can

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smoke in bed,” he said, propped up on one elbow, and momentarily in the flare of his cigarette I saw the speaker’s face more clearly. My fieldwork was fraught with such invasions of privacy, such scenic exposure to the everyday rituals of sleeping, eating, washing, to the everyday bodily intimacies of lives lived hard in the generalized spaces of park edges, backstreets, drop-in centers, and refuges. I got to know the angular shapes of the rough sleeping blokes, their skin sighing away from their unshaven cheek bones with too much cask wine, their walking stiff and slow from joints familiar with concrete, their hair manky and clumped. I got to know the hopeful confidence of young people on methadone, the overbright eyes and skin filmic with sweat, the tank tops in the winter city wind. I became familiar with the baleful gaze of white eyes, the irises just a pin-prick on their horizon, and with skin erupting in protest at the strange chemicals pulsing beneath, the punctured veins retreating deeper and deeper. In an interview once, a boy proffered his arm slit neatly three times lengthways from inner elbow to wrist for my consideration. Slot cars, I thought, feeling a blackness creeping forward across my scalp into my eyes. I had talked to myself a lot about this moment—I had a habit of fainting under extreme emotional stress and had not made it through one dissection in science. The advice had been to clench my bum muscles “like you’re holding something in” and remember to breathe. It was the shameful thought of letting this boy down that kept me upright though. Come hell or high water, I was not going to leave him sitting there next to the tape recorder with his arm stapled up like a school project while I faded out on the floor. It was the clumps of dark hair on the gym-turned-drop-in-center floor that finally did me in though—I did not faint, but I went home with my stomach lodged in the back of my throat and my bum muscles clamped. I had calmly watched the restraint of a psychotic young man by a squad of four plainclothes police. I had admired the routinized precision of it, the two women making the first smiling contact, the two men following with batons held behind and all wearing running shoes just in case. The boy’s bellowing echoed through the gym while we all stood fixated in a far corner next to the out-of-date computers only good for Tetris games. The

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clumps of his hair, left thickly on the gym floor still wavy, too succinctly summarized the struggle. Tasting “I’m schizophrenic with homicidal tendencies,” said Mary by way of introduction as she thumped down into the armchair next to me. “Don’t worry,” she grinned confidently, slapping me sharply and hard across the thigh, “I’m not going to kill you.” My interview with Mary took place in the sun on the back verandah of a women’s boarding house in inner-city Brisbane. Mary had made me a coffee, and I was comforted by the predictable taste: a kind of chemical taste that only coffee from catering-sized tins could produce. I loved the stuff; it made me feel at home. Every service I had ever done fieldwork in had a tin of Caterer’s Blend, and it’s what I had always spooned out into the polystyrene cups at the food van, along with at least three or four sugars every time. I noted that people living homeless, especially the young ones, always had at least three sugars. The familiar smell of hot Caterer’s Blend splashed comfortingly into my jeans following Mary’s jolting slap, and I knew it would dry quickly in the full November sun. Caterer’s Blend and orange drink mix, two-minute noodles, cereal, strange packets of savory and sweet snack foods I had never ever seen in the supermarket, and frozen pies. These were the donated culinary staples of the homelessness sector, it seemed. Once I encountered Turkish delight, offered from a large cardboard box before I said my piece at a National Homeless Person’s Week event. I motioned a chewing action, tried to swallow the rock-hard piece whole, and then fought to suppress my gagging reflex as it hovered resistantly in the back of my throat. There was also the time at a drop-in meals service when the women at my table forgave my red-faced abstinence from the hospital-mash by sending me forth to claim my unwanted main and dessert portions so they could be packaged in discrete takeaway containers produced from oversized bags and eaten later. For the food van service there was a portable specialty—donated hot dogs in donated long, soft, white rolls. Early on I used to pompously grate to myself about the insubstantiality of this food. Of course, I had

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not thought back then about the broken teeth, infected gums, and sensitive stomachs of many rough sleepers that would not handle anything substantial or about just how many tiding-over meals could be stretched from a couple of eskis of boiling water with hotdogs bobbing, from the garbage bags of bread seconds, from the liters of sauce. I used to sort the rolls in the church car park, pressing for the soft crusts through my plastic food-preparation gloves. Like those running food vans or drop-in services, staff in the refuges also did their best to cook good meals within the limits of budgets and donations. I would sometimes eat an evening meal with the staff and clients of a youth refuge and got used to the eye-rolling, vomiting, and slurping noises or loud burps with which dares were issued for confrontations with staff by the young residents. I would note the white-faced new arrivals and the heavy drug users grimly pushing and piling their meal around the plate, before finally sticking to the orange drink mix. Every so often I would freeze when a fork was thrown down and a raised, darkened voice would ask, “What is this shit?” and the inevitable argument between client, worker, and other clients ensued. No one wanted reminding that they were eating charity. Touching I had my hand on Jeannie’s throat; her hand was on mine guiding it over the tissue that tangled lumpily across her windpipe. Jeannie was nodding slowly as my eyes widened; she was satisfied with my response. “Pretty bad, ay?” She’d had me in a guilty laughter fit a moment earlier, describing outrageously a mad moment in which she lay in the dark across a highway, waiting for a truck to end her gambling habit and tortured family relations, only to change her mind at the last minute. As she sat up, however, she was struck by a car and “flown into the gutter.” An emergency tracheotomy and three years later, I was feeling the scars push up between my fingers. “True story, I swear on a stack of bibles.” She kept my hand there too long, our faces close—I could smell the Holiday 50s— and the laughter quelled suddenly in the stuffy interview room while the mini-disc whirred on, recording the exchange as a silence. At the end of the interview, she walked me back downstairs to the refuge common area

44 | Beside One’s Self with her arm slung protectively around my shoulders, little affectionate squeezes punctuating her continued conversation, me knowing the scar tissue would be sucking in and out as she talked. It was often like this. The immediate intensity and intimacy afforded between strangers in the research interview extended to an assumed bodily familiarity too. An embrace became the final full stop of many interviews. Over and over I would stand clutched in an interview room and this kind of grasping was fiercely delivered and returned. There seemed a compulsion in it, a kind of automated need for physical connection and comfort. This was the final muted discussion, an exchange that could only occur, it seemed, between bodies pressed together, an exchange that would cover our thanks and our acknowledgment that something had passed between us, and would not again. It grieved me to deny this last moment in my interviews with men, to deny that holding together of the two sides of a wound. As it was, each interview would end with a comma. We would squeeze each other’s hands often, trying to communicate that last finalizing acknowledgment, but I never felt it was enough for me or for them. Occasionally a sexually explicit invitation or compliment would be offered by men to point to the fierce intimacy reached in interviewing, but also to break it, to signal a return to the rules of normal interaction under which I was fair game again. Such comments would set in train the separation process, the jokes while packing up recording equipment, and the hollow promise, “See you round.” Smelling Sorrow reeks, I came to realize. Rusty piss and armpit stink wafted in cloying, depressive clouds. The tang of the sweats, alcohol, cigarettes, sex work, and squats could not be easily sloughed off skin or material. It permeated bodies, clothing, and refuge furniture alike. It collected under the nails, caught between teeth, drew hair flatly to the scalp, patterned dark patches through layers of clothing. One of Ruby’s charges was for stealing toothpaste and deodorant from a “dumb cunt” chemist, and Ben simply stopped going to work once he started to smell himself. It was hard to keep on top of things, he said, sleeping as he did at his local cricket oval in the sports equipment shed.

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For the first hour of opening the youth drop-in staff would be busy handing out shavers, guest soaps, and deodorants from the stores out the back. There was a prized, festive newness about these packaged products, the luxurious promise of once-off use. Soon a steamy short-lived cleanliness would warm the place up as the young people cycled through the showers and threw happy cupfuls of generic laundry powder into the wash with their stripped-off clothes. There were even some dressing gowns, donated by a local hotel, for use until the dryer came to a stop. Once I bowled up to closed doors and a notice about a staff training session, and as I stood in momentary disappointment myself I wondered how many had held on to the thought of a hot shower through the night. At the drop-in for women sex workers the place would fill with the fug of too much shampoo, deodorant, and perfume while the washing machine strained to churn the sex from the previous night’s outfits. In the bathroom there was good quality liquid hand wash in a dispenser and, in the vanity, a range of body lotions, hair sprays, trial perfume sachets, and lip gloss alongside the boxes of tampons, lube, and condoms. Once, the staff organized for an aromatherapist to give the women clients free foot massages. Vella chain-smoked erratically, scattering ash across herself while the therapist did her best with geranium and lavender on old feet, cracked and deformed from too many decades in six-inch heels. Listening I was at a men’s refuge and on my wrist was a discrete alarm designed like a watch—I simply had to press it and a siren would go off over the P.A., the worker had said. “And leave the door ajar, some of our men don’t like closed-in spaces. They can get violent and some of them aren’t well, as I’m sure you’re aware.” This wrist alarm was much better than the ungainly thing I had used while volunteering as an outreach worker. I’d had to go out round the Cross talking to young female sex workers with what seemed like a cereal box slung round my neck, the pull down cord that set the alarm off dangling out the front of my tee-shirt like a life-jacket inflation device. At one of the youth refuges, I had to shout through some of the security doors to identify who was there because of the limited camera

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coverage. And once, in another refuge, I sat in the Perspex office watching a locked-out, unwanted visitor raging silently in black and white on the CCTV while a decision about whether or not to call the police was made. And when Shaunie got put out for three days after workers smelled the dope smoke in his refuge room for the third time, he smashed his fist into the wall as he stormed out of the office; I heard it from the kitchen and saw the indentations in the plaster later. His rage floated up from the courtyard: “Yous can lick my salty balls, ya pack of dirty cunts!” I did not have an alarm, though, when I needed one, of course, when I longed for a team of rescuers to break me out of the interview room and release me into fresh air and full sun. She had limped in so slowly, this tiny girl. She chose a straight-backed office chair rather than one of the armchairs I had arranged around the coffee table, adjusting her neck and shoulders and leg as she sat. She did not give me much eye contact, and we had barely started when she quite abruptly asked me, painfully, to please lower your voice and please turn the lights out because they hurt my eyes. I felt stingingly then the loudness of my whole body—its health, its physical power, its intentness. I had overlooked this, not restrained it enough; I saw clearly how I had tried too hard and was thankful for her suggestion of the darkness that smoothed things over. I listened to this girl in the interview room dusk matching up her injured body with the multiple assaults, with being pushed from a balcony, with being put through the front windscreen of a car. She shifted around awkwardly on the chair and described being kept in a locked room. Her father, her boyfriends, a taxi driver morphed in and out of alcohol binges and pill overdoses and the whispering that said, use a knife. In the dimmed light, her quiet voice came toward me across the coffee table, her little shaky pauses, her held down sobs. I hear her now, that gentle, gentle girl who brought me streaming to my knees, empty, savaged, hopeless. Catch I can only describe the research work I have done as a constant physical, emotional, and sensory roller-coaster, a kind of guided chaos: my stomach

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dropping and heaving, my eyes over-filling, and a silent scream at times on my lips. I experienced most days in the field as a minor car accident from which I walked away bruised, stiff, and lucky. As Butler (2001, 38) argues, however, my very woundedness speaks my reflexive, empathetic, and sensorial inscription by the felt-experiences of others: “I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control.” This is not to suggest that all research of the felt that takes place through intercorporeal and emotional engagement will result in the wounding of the researcher, just that there is always a risk to both self and other in their opening into each other in the field. The very permeability and connectedness of the researcher body-subject leaves her open to the possibility of knowing the felt, but also leaves her vulnerable to the possibility of injury; this is one “catch” of corporeography as a research methodology of the felt. In Bondi’s (2003, 72–73) view, however, in the research interview the interviewer should be able “to manage the encounter openly and respectfully” and “tolerate the unconscious impact of the other person’s distress, recognizing that the anxiety, fear or anger belongs to his- or her-self, and the initial distress belongs to the interviewee.” Bondi (ibid., 69) suggests that the clear conscious and unconscious effects of interaction at the root of empathetic understanding can be balanced or controlled, that the effects of being “fully absorbed by the interviewee’s story” can be managed through oscillating between “observation” of and “participation” in the interviewee’s story. As Bondi (ibid., 70) spells out, “What is needed of the interviewer is the capacity to understand the interviewee’s feelings while simultaneously staying in touch with the difference between the other person’s feelings and his or her own.” Likewise, Kurt H. Wolff (1976, 20) argues that alongside “the risk of being hurt” in the investigation of felt and lived experience is the desire of the researcher to make sense of experience, a desire that necessitates the pulling-back from a total identification with experience. While a researcher may surrender to experience, she also wants to take hold of “the cognitive or existential result, yield, harvest .  .  . of surrender” (ibid.). Similarly to Bondi, Wolff points to the tension between yielding to experience and

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also holding the “yield” or “catch” or understanding of this surrender, but he also suggests that the active desire to make sense of experience intervenes in this tension and creates the critical distance necessary for the researcher “to catch . . . to make, to communicate” (ibid., 22). As Wolff (ibid., 23) argues, “Since the surrenderer wants to know there is the love of the catch, of understanding, conceiving, considering so that others can be told what has occurred.” How it is that the interviewer implements such critical distancing or manages unconscious identification in particular is not clear, and indeed what I take from Bondi’s work is exactly an indication of the radical unmanageability of the self. It is the instability of the borders of self and other that precisely makes a shared “catch” of felt-experience possible and yet at the same time there is also a “catch” to the unpredictability of empathetic engagement—vicarious traumatization or the more diffusely named burnout that support workers in the field warned me about. Being beside one’s self is necessary to the processes of intersubjective, intercorporeal knowledge production as suggested above, and yet is also an emotional state that speaks not just of the productive epistemological value of a researcher’s “fragmentation” (Nast 1998, 96) in the field but of the damaging grief that such uncontrollable fragmentation might bring. “Compassion fatigue as the natural consequence of working with people who have experienced stressful events,” Jane Dunkley and Thomas A. Whelan (2006a, 109) argue, has the potential to negatively impact on counselors’ “empathetic abilities” and their ethical management of counseling relationships (Dunkley and Whelan 2006b, 452)—a situation that issues a strong caution to social research practitioners also echoed in Laurier and Parr’s (2000) work. If the researcher self is unmanageable, then what risks—identifiable and unidentifiable—might she pose to research participants? Though she may indeed be wounded, what wounds might she also inflict on already injured and more vulnerable others? Is such wounding justifiable or even avoidable? The potential for injury applies to the research participant who consents to take part in an interview, who is made aware of the generalized context of risk of participation, but who is also as necessarily unprepared for the chaotic nature of intersubjective exchange and the intensified

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experience of his or her own corporeal permeability as the interviewer. Though I have focused on the impact of emotional research engagement on the interviewer, I also want to signal that further study is sorely needed of vulnerable participants’ different experiences of research participation. Recent research by Pierre Philippot et al. (2007, 496) suggests, for example, that “there is the possibility that participating in research might constitute a victimizing experience for some homeless people.” I have sketched elsewhere (Robinson 2004), however, that homeless participants’ experiences of research may also in fact be positive in that the research interview may offer a therapeutic form of engagement and a space for recognition to which they have rare access. Nonetheless, a thorough evaluation of such potential benefits and dangers of research participation is required. More generally, Laurier and Parr’s (2000, 101) question—“What kind of emotional and ethical space should the interviewer work toward if not a managerial one?”—takes on an even greater significance in the context of the very uncertain promise of emotions management in research. As Butler (2001, 22) makes clear, however, it is not self-evident that the opaqueness and therefore unmanageability of the self is necessarily problematic for ethical relationship building. Being beside one’s self, becoming foreign to oneself in allowing one’s exposure to others, is in fact the condition of the ethical recognition of others, Butler suggests. That “we are vulnerable to the address of others in ways we cannot fully control” involves both “a primary experience of trauma” that “heightens responsibility” for the other who addresses me (Butler 2001, 38). As Rosalyn Diprose (2002, 126) likewise suggests, “The other affects me, gets under my skin, and that is why I am made to think.” Our thinking of the other precisely comes about in the ways we emerge as corporeally different through, because of, our relations with others. To return to Butler’s terms, it is in this corporeal difference that “ethical valence” (Butler 2001, 31) lies: “I find that my very formation implicates the Other in me, that my own foreignness to myself, is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others” (Butler 2001, 37). So the “catch” of corporeography might on one hand be its impossibility in some research contexts, its unmanageability and potential risk to participants, and the compassion fatigue of the researcher brought about

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by the radical and at times traumatic nature of intercorporeal research. On the other hand, the “catch” or the “yield” as Wolff describes it, of corporeographic research might be an empathetic, ethical, and communicative understanding of others reached through the “compassionate bond” (Leder 1990, 162). These are the potential risks and contributions of a methodological approach that relies on the lived body and the kinds of unpredictable reflexive, empathetic, and sensable field engagements that reshape it. It is to the fraught yet also rich yield of my corporeographic approach to research that I now turn in the following chapters. I draw across my engagement with felt homelessness that I have tried to account for here, tying together the key themes of my corporeographic encounters, especially as these become further substantiated in interview data. In these next chapters, I come into the felt-experience of homelessness and flesh it out. I write of that which has come to me through my body, through my seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, listening, through my synesthetic gut feeling, through sentient resonance, through my absorption by the felt-experiences of others. Though I write without knowing which body moves me to do so, I work to make sense of homelessness, to catch homelessness felt and lived.

2 Beside One’s Self To survive, I must destroy my body. —Leslie Young, “Sexual Abuse and the Problem of Embodiment”

I t was m y sh i f t to biogr a ph y that finally allowed a more complete engagement with the trauma that accumulates in homeless people’s lives. By the start of my biographic research on homelessness and mental disorders in 2002, I had also been doing relief shifts as a youth accommodation worker for nearly two years. Though I had been constantly exposed to both the stories and embodied impacts of trauma as a refuge worker, there was something about hearing biographical narratives relentlessly and in a research context that eventually made me feel as though I was engaging with homeless people’s trauma for the first time. With no direct action to take, no immediate response to see through, no responsibility for followup, referrals, or case notes and no remarks for handover meetings, I could not start to address or manage what I was hearing or feeling in research interviews. The stories sat raw, troubling my nights. It is not that I ever asked for stories of trauma—none of the fieldwork had a specific focus on experiences of violence and abuse—but they came and came nonetheless. I was glad for the business of coordinating interviews and managing the fieldwork teams as well as labeling and filing and sending of tapes for someone else, thankfully, to transcribe. Then, at the conclusion of the fieldwork in Brisbane—my hoped-for happy holiday moment—came a time and place in which I thought it was over, in which 51

52 | Beside One’s Self I tried to signal to myself that I was now reclaiming a space away from homelessness. That holiday, though, was just the beginning of months in which the interviews, unbidden, replayed themselves. I experienced a process of unescapable corporeal transcription, a rewinding, pausing, and forwarding I could not control. Driven home to me was the realization that the field was not a place of entry and exit, but a carnal relationship that left permanent traces. I remained strangely hyped and suspicious. Under siege. It was through those torrid months of forced dwelling on my fieldwork that I more clearly came to understand homelessness as a feltexperience of trauma, as a constellation of traumatic events that traveled, white and burningly present, yet ever delayed and ungraspable, through homeless people’s lives. In particular, the new experience of interviewing adults was central to this developing understanding of the centrality of trauma to homelessness. For the first time I could see into young people’s futures and more clearly make sense of their pasts as these were consistently retold with a bluntness and insight that only comes with survival. The dawning of such violent stars in my own corporeal consciousness was, weirdly, a relief. I could see back into all of my research in new ways and see the absences, the avoidances, the danger zones where participants remained silent or where I knew to move on and not press for further details. The restrained grief and savage humor characterizing young people’s interviews was contextualized, as was my struggle to find the postfieldwork world familiar. Ironically, my defensive anger about being forced to confront forms of trauma I had not been able to imagine became replaced by anger that I didn’t do so earlier and in much greater depth. My research remained too silent on the pain that finally reached me, that I finally heard resonantly, months after the interviews were over. I wanted to go back to my research participants and push for something that could not be given. I wanted what would surely be the “real” stories, the graphic evidence, that would match the impacts, that would better justify my clarified picture of the ever-accumulating devastation. The statements “My father molested me,” “He threw a knife at me,” and “He started bashing me” seemed insipid, not even vaguely approximate, when hope and wholeness withered.

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I came to realize, though, that the description of a traumatic event gives away little of what trauma can become when it is felt and lived. Indeed, in order to make sense of many trajectories of homelessness, in this chapter I argue that it is crucial to understand not the nature of a traumatic event but what manner of suffering trauma itself is, to understand what kind of felt impact a traumatic event can have and why. While trauma events are central in the immediate loss of accommodation (Robinson 2003a), it is the resulting felt effects of being traumatized, of corporeal displacement into pain, that also continue to give shape to trajectories of homelessness. As I experienced in a vicarious way, it is the enduring bodily entrapment in remembered trauma through which a traumatic event has its greatest effect. Interestingly, despite the plethora of evidence documenting the centrality of sexual and physical abuse in the biographies of young homeless people within child abuse and neglect literature and child and adolescent health and substance abuse literatures, in social research being traumatized is rarely examined seriously as a key structuring principle of trajectories of homelessness. The concern not to individualize and pathologize those homeless has perhaps encouraged the almost total lack of engagement between psychological and sociological perspectives on homelessness. The lack of focus in social research on the enduring impacts of “cumulative trauma” (ibid., 33) is particularly troubling, however, in the context of a recent increase in research evidence identifying psychological issues, abuse and violence as of “growing significance” in causing women’s homelessness in particular (Watson 2000, 164). Clearly understanding trauma as a repeated and long-term feltexperience of painful bodily displacement is critically important to complex conceptualizations of and responses to homelessness. In providing a context through which to make sense of young homeless people’s physical, psychological and emotional struggles and needs, a strong acknowledgment of the long-term corporeal effects of trauma in fact de-pathologizes young people’s “deviant” behavior and counters popular claims that young homeless people are “runaways” who “can’t handle discipline” or who are inherently antisocial. As Mark-David Janus and colleagues (cited

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in Tyler et al. 2001, 153; see Janus et al. 1987) suggest, “These youths are running from something, not running to something.” In my research, young people’s corporeal suspension in trauma was made evident through their self-reporting of trauma events and traumarelated mental disorders such as personality disorders and through their discussion of what are commonly understood to be presenting issues related to underlying trauma, including drug and alcohol abuse, selfharm, and suicidal behaviors. I explore these issues as coping mechanisms used in managing the enduring painful bodily memories of sexual and physical abuse. For the young people taking part in my research, being homeless was not simply about being without stable, safe housing but about being with the sometimes permanent and fragmenting somatic memory of past abusive homes. As Read (1996, 111) suggests, “Memories are ghosts that won’t lie down.” Homes That Haunt Oh what happened was me Dad left when I was six ’cause he got into an affair and stuff and he used to bash me up every day, all day. Used to stab me with screw drivers in the head and stuff and I just hate him. I don’t talk to him. I haven’t spoken to him since I was six and I’ll never speak to him again. Mum got a boyfriend and he was alcoholic and I didn’t like him and Mum kicked me out ’cause I didn’t get on with him and he didn’t get on with me. They went away to Singleton and left me at home by myself and I was what, seven, eight years old? Left me inside the house locked up. Couldn’t get out. Couldn’t play with me friends. Nothing. It was bad. Coppers come round, “Where’s your mum at?” They smashed a window to get inside, “Where’s your mum at?” I said, “She’s gone away to Singleton, I live here by myself.”

For young homeless people, trauma events are most likely to include physical and sexual abuse. Familial physical and sexual abuse have been widely established in Australian and international literature as a central and even repeated experience for young homeless people. Studies have revealed that over 70 percent of young homeless women and 30 percent of young homeless men can be expected to be survivors of sexual abuse and that over 70 percent of young homeless men and 30 percent of

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young homeless women can be expected to be survivors of physical abuse (Thrane et al. 2006; Whitbeck, Hoyt and Bao 2000). A study undertaken in a southern state of the United States found that 60 percent of the sample of adolescent homeless youth reported sexual abuse (Rew, Taylor-Seehafer, and Fitzgerald 2001, 234). Another study conducted in inner-city Sydney found that 65 percent of homeless young women reported familial physical abuse and 50 percent reported familial sexual abuse (Hatty, Davis, and Burke 1996, 50). Both forms of abuse were predominantly inflicted by fathers and stepfathers (ibid., 51). In their study conducted with homeless men and women of all ages in inner-city Sydney, Hodder, Teesson, and Buhrich (1998, 30) simply concluded that “the majority of people have experienced physical or sexual assault.” I’m twenty-six. I left home when I was about twelve because it was really violent at home and it just wasn’t good for me to be there anymore, so I pretty much nearly been on my own since then . . . Yeah and when I left home, I’ve had my fair share of so-called long-term relationships and ended up getting beaten up for my trouble and things like that . . . I’ve had my fair share of that happening. In between getting beaten up all the time when I was a kid and then that and then living on the street, a lot of bad things can happen, especially to a girl, you know.

Physical and sexual abuse histories have been strongly correlated with running away from home in multiple studies and with young homeless people’s high rates of mental illness, substance abuse, co-occurring mental illness and substance abuse, self-harm, and suicidal behavior (see, for example, Kidd and Kral 2002; Molnar et al 1998; Yoder 1999). Young homeless people have been found more likely to engage coping strategies such as self-harm and drug and alcohol use than their homed counterparts (Ayerst 1999), and their high rates of suicide and suicide behavior have been found to be linked to their high rates of physical and sexual abuse (Rew, Taylor-Seehafer, and Fitzgerald 2001, 226). Likewise, high rates of drug and alcohol abuse have been linked with young homeless people’s high rates of physical and sexual abuse (ibid., 228). —And then my father hit me over the head with a baseball bat and told me to get out and I ended up on the streets . . . I’d love to go back, but me dad bashes me . . .

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There’s no way you’d go back to that . . . The funny thing about it is the police do nothing about domestic violence. I tried putting an AVO [apprehended violence order] on my old man, but it didn’t work. —Why’s that, do you reckon? —Because the coppers say he’s trying to teach you the right way . . . I’m thinking, what, how? By locking me in a cupboard and belting me with an extension cord? That’s abuse, not being taught a lesson, that’s about getting abused.

Further, as Lisa Goodman, Leonard Saxe, and Mary Harvey (1991; see also Fullilove 1996, 1517) argue, it is also critical to note that becoming homeless itself can be understood as a trauma event and significant risk factor for psychological trauma, which will exacerbate any pre-existing emotional and psychological distress and which will also likely involve repeated trauma events including sexual and physical assault. As Les B. Whitbeck, Danny R. Hoyt and Wa-Ning Bao (2000, 723) argue, experiences of “persistent vulnerability, coercive interactions, witnessing violence and despair, and actual victimisation,” all part of daily street life, result in psychological symptoms and add to existing disorders (see also Robinson 2003a). I mean, I do have a good relationship with Mum and Dad and my two sisters but I’ve got a brother and I really hope . . . That’s the one thing about moving home is hoping that he’s not going to call and that means I’m going to answer. ’Cause when I was younger I was abused by him and everything so it’s kind of, it’s been really difficult being at home sometimes ’cause I see his photo around and I don’t know if he’s going to come visit or . . . It’s a bit freaky.

Echoing this grim summary, in my own research a picture of the centrality of trauma in young homeless people’s lives emerged. Though I did not ask young people in any of my interviews to discuss possible trauma histories, twelve young people directly reported physical and sexual abuse, including incest, within their familial home and in subsequent forms of accommodation, and many more hinted at the presence of dangerous family members or unsafe time periods in their past. Several young people reported multiple experiences of trauma such as experiencing physical and sexual abuse as a child and as an independent young

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adult, surviving life-threatening car accidents, and being held hostage for subjection to ongoing physical and sexual assault. Basically I’ve had . . . I’m going to be straightforward here. My life’s been shit . . . ’Cause when I was a little kid my father molested me, my father bashed me. My stepfather used to bash me each time he came home from work and yeah, I’ve never really liked blokes and I especially don’t like Dad either.

Young homeless people also discussed the range of presenting issues associated with being traumatized, including homelessness. They made it clear that feelings of pain, depression, and desperation were self-medicated and alleviated through abuse of alcohol and drugs and through self-harm. They discussed an inability to hold on to accommodation—whether refuges, private rental, or public housing—because of deteriorating mental health and hospitalization, uncontrolled and violent behavior, emotional stress, chronic drug and alcohol misuse, self-harm and suicidal behavior, all issues, as discussed earlier, so often specifically linked with traumatic histories of physical and sexual abuse. —Me and my mum don’t get along . . . so we were just fighting all the time and she told me to leave. —Did she organize anywhere for you to stay or . . . —No, she told me to go out for a walk to cool off. Come back an hour later and half my stuff was out the front . . . I just took what I could carry, two bags of my clothes and my quilt and went to my boyfriend’s house and I stayed there for two years. He started getting really bad. I found out he was on drugs. He started bashing me . . . I left with nowhere else to go.

Having exited dangerous home situations in distress, while very vulnerable and desperate to avoid the streets, young people reported taking up other unsafe housing options in the hope of safety. Some instead experienced further abusive revictimization and consequently new forms of homelessness. In the rare situation where young homeless people did secure safe accommodation, some discussed simply being unable to stay there because of feelings of isolation, fear, and emotional turbulence. Without the immediate stress of focusing on finding accommodation,

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young people found themselves confronted by distressing personal issues at a time in which they were without the supports of either street family or twenty-four-hour refuge care. Young people feared what they would do to themselves alone in accommodation and some still spent their days hanging around refuges or using day drop-in centers to fill in time, for safety and company, and because they did not really know what else to do. —So your stepmum didn’t look after you once your dad died? —She wasn’t allowed to because my mother wanted me. But she didn’t want me because she just treated me really bad basically, let my stepdad do what he wanted, treat me as bad as he wanted. —Was there violence or . . . —Yeah, with him. I’ve got scars all over the back of me head. He’s slammed me into concrete and everything like that. I got a scar on me back, he threw a knife at me and he’s done some like really bad things and within about a month, three weeks to a month, I ended up being driven away. I just didn’t want to stay.

Although it is certainly not the case that all young homeless people become homeless because they are fleeing familial physical and sexual abuse, homelessness, for many of the young people I interviewed, seemed to pivot centrally around traumatic experiences of abuse that took place at home and in following contexts of vulnerability while homeless. Despite the repeated presentations of traumatic experiences and emotional distress in my interviews with young homeless people, however, my account of the felt-experience of trauma remains seriously incomplete. I have accounts of some of the trauma events young people experienced and I have indications of young people’s participation in coping behaviors symptomatic of underlying psychological trauma. I have, however, no account of the experience of being traumatized itself. What are the felt and lived consequences of experiencing a traumatic event? My Dad’s . . . that place was always a hell-hole to me. Just going there [postabuse] I’d look around, the house’d be quiet but I’d hear all the screams . . . I used to scream . . . and I’d feel all the feelings I used to feel when I was younger and I was living there, like I can’t wait to get out of here kinda thing. It was never a home atmosphere, it was always tense, and you know, on edge . . .

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My central aim for the remainder of this chapter is to develop a better account of what it might be like to experience traumatic body memory, of what happens to bodies that carry traumatic memory, and of how such memory is managed and survived in the context of homelessness. I begin, perhaps surprisingly, with a consideration of my own nontraumatized body memory, for as I will go on to suggest, it is a general awareness of the critical importance of body memory that for me precedes a fuller appreciation of the negative impacts of trauma. Drawing on the phenomenological work of Casey and the psychobiological work of Babette Rothschild, Bessel van der Kolk, Joanne Hall, Lori Kondora, and Leslie Young in particular, I develop an account first of how habitual body memory fluidly orients the bodily self in place and in time, and second of how traumatic body memory displaces the bodily self into timelessness and placelessness. Returning to my fieldwork, I then use an account of the persistence of the pain of traumatic events to contextualize young homeless people’s misuse of drugs and alcohol and their self-harming and suicidal behaviors. My aim is to piece together a fuller picture of the felt-experiences of corporeal displacement and disembodiment that traumatic events induce. Such a picture, I argue, is in turn central to understanding homelessness as a trajectory of grief and sentient suffering. “The Body Remembers” We’d come round the face of Pelion West the day before, columns of rock spiraling up into the soundless mist. On the opposite side of the valley half a day’s walking later we were strewn amongst springy flowering heath melting chocolate in our mouths and looking back at our route above a tendril of snow caught in the tuck between cliff-face and scree. Despite some brief elation on top of Achilles, by the time we came down to Leonard’s Tarn for a late lunch I couldn’t speak. My fingers were fat with blood and frayed from gripping dolerite. We’d pushed too hard too long in the sun which had quickly drilled its way through morning cloud. The pack strap on one shoulder had started to bite and I could feel my leechsucked skin pulsing under sweat-soaked socks.

As Casey (2000) argues, the connection of the body in place in the present relies on habitual memories of being at home in the past. The body,

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experienced as it is in habituating familiar places past, has a capacity to create and maintain a comforting continuity of spatial orientation and, indeed, a comforting continuity of selfhood. Through “its own sedimented memories of place” (ibid., 194), the body is equipped to sustain and remake its place in the world, and through body and place memory the self is furnished with remembered, coherent, habitual, and historical ways of occupying itself and the world. In short, for Casey (ibid., 168), “This means that in body memories the past is a direct constituent of the present” and that undisrupted body memories shaped by place in particular are central to ways in which we continue to inhabit, move within, and make sense of, our past, present, and future. Hunched forward, I grimly crunched Vita-Wheats. I looked steadily down at ants busy with the unexpected arrival of biscuit crumbs and then examined my shin already blackening from where I’d kicked into a boulder screened by low scrub. Weariness settled and I turned over thoughts of the exposed boulder-field on the ascent ahead of us. Sighing, I dropped my cheek to my thigh, letting the sun bake my clothes stiff.

Casey’s work compels me to begin thinking through the constitutive role of body and place memory in terms of their felt significance in my own body. What does it mean to suggest that “the body remembers” (Rothschild 2000)? I get closer to understanding how place and body memory work to inform who we are and “how we are in the world” (Casey 2000, 149) by surfacing the felt presence of my own place past. I focus now on my body as I write, willing it to yield the secrets of its shaping. I start to trace back my spatial roots, trying to place my capacity to cohere and sustain a sense of self across time. In time, I felt a kind of satisfying languor as my overtired body gathered itself again. The bees were loud and fi nally, raising my head, I found we were in a garden of Scoparia in flower and still the mammoth shoulders of Pelion West rose above the tarn. Pencil pines gathered at the water’s edge, butterflying in surface reflections. Cup in hand I joined them there, knees in armpits, balanced forward, scooping deep into the tea-colored darkness.

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Foregrounded is my sense of a comforting habituation of, a homeliness of, place repeated through my life course. In particular, I think of familiar wilderness places made homeplaces and the nurturing interpersonal interactions these have continued to sustain. I remember the snow cave I made with my brother near Kitchen Hut at Cradle Mountain one year, the French sweet tins we whirred across a frozen Lake Dobson, my father’s skis keeping mine straight as we made tandem runs. And later, a honeymoon ascent of Mount Geryon. I recall my body as an enduring source of orientations and skills that not only allow me to feel held rightly in place in wilderness but also enable the sudden experience of profound, ecstatic rootedness there. And then I remember Leonard’s Tarn. It was then that I saw the girl, blue denim shorts, bare feet, an old school shirt and yellow plastic mug. She too was squatted down near a pencil pine, toes digging into pineapple grass on the tarn’s curved lip, the filled mug in her hand, her head tipped slightly to one side. She knew to skim the water from tarns shallower than this, scattering tadpoles but leaving behind rising clouds of earthy sediment. She’d been taught how to angle her feet descending on loose surfaces, to avoid roots on rainforest floors, to kick in snow steps with the point of her boot. She’d had lemon thyme pressed into her hand and felt her spirit soar at its renewing scent. She could select a tent site, rake the ground for sharp stones or roots with her fi ngers, sense how her sleeping body would lie with the roll of the earth. She knew the difference between wallaby, devil, and wombat droppings, could name a good number of surrounding peaks, and collected alpine flowers for her press. She had written her family’s names neatly in countless logbooks left wedged in rock ledges and hut awnings. She’d swum fast underwater in mountain lakes with her eyes open, picking out pebble treasure, somersaulting in shafts of yellow light.

In trying to make sense of the formative role of body and place memory, I am brought to write of the embeddedness of my somatic geography in wilderness places. I also write of my experience of the ecstatic alignment of body, place and memory in which my body thundered with a blinding pulse of coherence, in which I felt, paradoxically, boundlessly,

62 | Beside One’s Self perfectly, in place. I remember the “radiant” “luminosity” of that place (Casey 2000, 200); I remember remembering at Leonard’s Tarn. She was me at twelve, unselfconscious and contained. Me photographed at Artist’s Pool, Cradle Mountain with my yellow mug, a girl now remembered, refelt, sixteen years later on the same mountain range. As we exchanged a steady gaze I was filled suddenly by an overwhelming sense of love for her, this unerring girl with her tilting head who guided me home from greater and greater distances, who lulled my body back into rhythm and calmed my tumbling mind. I loved this girl who showed me again the brave orchid, the white star pushed forth by cushion plants. I loved this girl who slowed my breath and spilled me from the edge of Leonard’s Tarn into the valley below. Because of her I found my place here, I made sense here, always. My hands reached for the first crush of lemon thyme, trailed over moss adorned with dew. My eyes knew where to look: the orange flare of fungus, the curling pandani, the windstreaked cloud, the flick of snake tail. I greeted the forest, dunked my head in rivers, and, naming the ranges, pressed the skyline to my lips. As our reflections spread out in the breeze, an incantation echoed through me: Thank you! I am made perfect by Leonard’s Tarn! Thank you.

It makes sense to me that in the wilderness of my Tasmanian home and childhood I achieve a depth of emplacement, a sense of return and a bodily freedom not experienced elsewhere. I experience at once the “emotional claim and resonance” (Casey 2000, 199) of this landscape and the habitual body memory of how to be there such that “my extended body ebbs and flows” (Leder 1990, 35) into tarn and Pencil Pine. I am in place, at home there, I am “supported and sustained” (Casey 2000, 199). There place and body memory tightly interweave in my lived trajectory across the landscape, and in the mutual recognition of place and body I am empowered. In remembering my remembering body at Leonard’s Tarn that day, brought home to me is a profound realization of the unavoidability of the bodily echo of spatial history, and also of the critical self-sustaining resource that placed embodiment constitutes. I also note the “freedom” I experience in memorializing my own past (Casey 2000, 292), and I come to more fully understand my “intact body” (ibid., 155) as the historical

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product in particular of wilderness places in which I have been loved and sheltered and nurtured and in which I have experienced spiritual and bodily joy. I am forced to work hard though, to give form and language to my remembered body. As Leder (1990, 25) argues, the intact, habitual, and ecstatic body will often “disappear” from consciousness because of its seamless capacity to function; it is only the “painful body” that more clearly “emerges as an alien presence” (ibid., 73). It is precisely the disappearing quality of the intact body that can make it difficult to fully understand the significance of bodily trauma and ensuing traumatic body memory. Unless one has experienced “catastrophic” (Grillon, Southwick, and Charney 1996, 278) pain or trauma, the body remains an unknown and unpredictable site of suffering. In more carefully thinking through how the relative seamlessness of my own body might be wrought through orienting habitual body and place memories and in particular, through my freedom from traumatic body and place memory, however, I begin to see more clearly how it is that painful bodily experience might gather the fragmenting force I have witnessed in the lives of young homeless people. I will myself to imagine that lovely girl at Artist’s Pool held down by her father, submitting to her brother, being punched and stabbed, being abandoned in an empty house. I force myself to imagine the bite of an extension cord in the small space between her shoulder blades. I am griefstricken already at writing this because not only do I know these are the precise betrayals experienced by young homeless people but also because I am now thinking more resonantly of the indelible nature of place and body memory and of the desperately needed positive orientation of such memory to be at home in one’s self, body, and world. Rather than a rich psychological and corporeal resource, for many of those whose pathways into and through homelessness include abuse and violence, the past is a “continual curse” (Casey 2000, 308) to be held at bay at whatever cost, and the future is a survival of “the coming of memories” (Kondora 1995, 21). The “Nonplace” of Trauma As Leder (1990, 76–77) argues, the immediate physical pain of an injury effects a form of corporeal “disruption” in the sense that the sudden,

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sharp bodily awareness that comes with injury creates a felt-experience of distance between the self and the painful body. The painful body is displaced from, separated from, and at odds with the self. As discussed earlier, in comparison to the seamlessness of bodily experience associated with habitual and ecstatic inhabitation, Leder (ibid., 76) suggests that “the painful body is often experienced as something foreign to the self.” The body emerges from its habitual concealment to confront the self through its dysfunction. Similarly, trauma as an enduring, remembered body-state can recast the body as a “thematic object” (Leder 1990, 79). The painfully thematized body precipitates a felt-experience of “fragmentation” (Casey 2000, 155). In opposition to the whole, habitual body, the traumatized body is “broken down” (ibid., 155) and perceived rifts develop between self and body, and in particular, between the self and those parts of the body that have been specific sites of trauma (Hall and Kondora 2005, 1351). Though no actual wounds are inflicted with the persistent recollection of trauma events, the painful slippage of the body likewise occurs because the immediacy of threat and injury nonetheless continues to be felt through the operation of body memory. Trauma is a particular kind of open wound, a wound that relates to the physical body but encompasses more than physicality, a wound that occurs in time but also defeats it. As such, trauma also can represent an enduring kaleidoscopic fragmentation of self and body; the body may thus also endure as always painfully thematized, a foreign burden, a constant threat. As Casey (2000, 179) suggests, “There is no getting around the body.” Trauma as a body-state endures because the body holds experiences of traumatic events whether or not survivors consciously remember them (Rothschild 2000, 15). Psychobiological research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) attempts to explain the bodily holding of memories of traumatic events and overwhelming emotional experiences, such as war, torture, rape, assault, accidents, natural disasters, imprisonment, and kidnapping. Such work seeks to account for the continued “reinstatement” (Grillon, Southwick, and Charney 1996, 288) of original trauma through exploring the neurobiological basis of somatic and emotional memory. Long-term and permanent neurobiological change triggered in survivors

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of trauma results in the inscription of past trauma in somatic memory in such a way that it can be reexperienced at any time as a current and threatening reality. Once extreme “emotional memories” (van der Kolk 1994, 261) become biologically written in the body through changed brain and physiological function, they are understood to be “indelible” (Grillon, Southwick, and Charney 1996, 290; van der Kolk 1994, 261). Indeed, van der Kolk (1994, 258) describes the “engraving of trauma” through the body. The details of traumatic memories are also unchanging once inscribed in the body. Thus, survivors of trauma can be consistently displaced from reality in periods of retraumatization in which the time and place of the trauma event endure without alteration and with frightening clarity. As van der Kolk (ibid., 253) suggests, some trauma survivors may remain permanently displaced from the time and place of the present, unable to move on from the past time and place of the traumatic event and the immediate response of extreme stress and fear it effects. The engraving of traumatic memory not only results in a reexperiencing of trauma but in a general “persistent and profound” altered bodily inhabitation, including “chronic hyperarousal”—vigilance, defensiveness—on one hand, and an emotional and physical numbness on the other (ibid., 254). Specifically, those experiencing post-traumatic stress are likely to react to all stress—minor or major—with an extreme “emergency” response that relates to experiences of initial trauma (ibid., 259). Again, the experience of a traumatic event is remembered and revisited by the body in felt detail. As Rothschild (2000, 6) discusses, in the context of PTSD, “Trauma continues to intrude with visual, auditory, and/or other somatic reality on the lives of its victims.” Rothschild (ibid., 7) argues that trauma survivors centrally experience “somatic disturbance” and the “bodily symptoms” of, and emotional responses to, actual trauma events whether or not these are remembered. As such, survivors may experience seemingly unexplained bodily or emotional sensations (ibid., 15). They may also experience sensory flashbacks and persistently reexperience normal bodily responses to trauma such as increased heart rate, sweating, and heart palpitations (ibid., 7). In response to such chronic hyperarousal, trauma survivors may “seem to shut down” (van der Kolk 1994, 254) and “might feel numb in body and/or emotions and complain of a sense of

66 | Beside One’s Self deadness in their lives” (Rothschild 2000, 15). Overall, it is agreed that PTSD involves a “high level of daily dysfunction” (ibid., 8) with particular effects on interpersonal relationships and employment (ibid., 7). Paradoxically, the remembrance of trauma is not only the central felt consequence of experiencing a traumatic event, but is also central to healing the psychophysiological wounds of trauma. “Survival, healing and empowerment” (Hall and Kondora 2005, 1354) seem to rely on a mending of the rifts between somatic and cognitive memories of trauma such that the self can “rehabilitate” (ibid., 1340), can rehabituate both body and place in nondestructive, nonfearful, and indeed coherent, integrated, and joyful ways. For Hall and Kondora (ibid., 1355) remembering signals a return to an integrated and habitual experience of body-self: “Remembering moves and completes our being.” The act of remembering-as-healing rather than retraumatization is an act of consciously placing events in the past and also a recognition of the continuity of the “personal past” with “present self-identity” (Casey 2000, 290). As Rothschild (2000, 150) succinctly notes, remembering is a process through which “somatic memory becomes personal history.” In remembering-as-healing, trauma survivors come to remember their bodily past as past but not as disconnected and alien. Specifically, remembering can be understood as a form of “bodily reconnection,” and as a process through which to “stay present” in the body by finally recognizing traumatic events as past (Mills and Daniluk 2002, 80). Remembering-as-healing is a process of recovering and “dwelling again in the self” (Hall and Kondora 2005, 1347), a process of “commemoration,” Hall and Kondora (ibid., 1353) argue, drawing on Casey, in which the links of past, present, and future are actively memorialized. Remembering is to “be oneself again” (ibid., 1340). In the felt-experience of ongoing traumatization, it is precisely the embodied activity of remembering and processing traumatic memory that is blocked—consciously or unconsciously. As earlier discussed, the body remains displaced into site or sites of trauma, which cannot be placed or left in the past. The trauma survivor faces “the problem of embodiment after traumatisation,” of how to rehabituate a “dangerous, damaged, or dead body” still stuck in the active memory of the trauma event (Young 1992, 90).

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For some, the already displaced, estranged body that causes overwhelming pain, fear, shame, and anxiety must be abandoned altogether, for example, through dissociation from the body in part or whole or through trying to exist in mindful ways only, cut off from the dangerous feelings welling in the body. In the context of dissociation, the body becomes no longer thematized but anesthetized. Young (ibid., 92) suggests that people experiencing trauma may learn how to anesthetize parts of their bodies in response to traumatic stress, to “go numb” or to “turn into a piece of wood.” Just as ballet dancers in Anna Aalten’s (2007) research may manage immediate physical injury through refusing to remember their pain and instead “striving for disembodiedness,” likewise for those surviving traumatic body memory, “when the body ‘speaks up’ it is habitually silenced into a mode of bodily absence” (ibid., 118). To block the body as the tool of remembrance, to become disembodied, is to seek refuge from overwhelming pain and to engage dissociation from the body as an involuntary and voluntary survival mechanism. Dissociation protects the self from total disintegration in the face of experiences “outside the range of what the human mind can assimilate” (Young 1992, 91–92). As Young (ibid., 93) notes, however, while the displacement of the traumatized body in the process of disembodiment affords the trauma survivor a sense of control over the past, this comes at the very great cost of also remaining displaced from any positive and comforting bodily engagement with the world. Such disembodiment is crippling when recovering the crucial “forgotten resources” of positive somatic memories could greatly assist in reducing the terror of traumatic ones (Rothschild 2000, 118). As a distinctly bodily capacity and practice, “without full access to one’s body . . . without the felt experience that ‘this is my body’” (Young 1992, 95), rememberingas-healing cannot be engaged in the context of continued disembodiment and the trauma survivor remains suspended, beside herself, disembodied, fragmented, in the context of trauma. Further, in being actively traumatized and disembodied the healing process remains blocked, and the body as the “‘location’ of personhood” is also denied (Young 1992, 95). For Kondora (1995, 24), “A person cannot exist and not remember,” and for Casey (2000, 182), “To be disembodied is not only to be deprived of place,

68 | Beside One’s Self unplaced; it is to be denied the basic stance on which every experience and its memory depend.” James M. Glass, for example, graphically illustrates being “psychically homeless” (1993, 139; see also Hoksbergen 1999) and experiencing “psychological placelessness” (Glass 1989, 58) in the aftermath of sexual and physical torture and trauma. “Cut off” from “physical and linguistic connection with the world” (Glass 1993, 145) in the placeless realm of psychosis, sociopolitical alienation, and institutionalization, Glass depicts those experiencing trauma-related psychosis—multiple personality disorders, for example—as radically homeless, radically displaced, literally beside themselves with “no fixed anchors” to a habitual and recognized form of self-hood or context of safety and belonging (ibid., 147). The felt-experience of traumatization can be understood as a kind of desolate way station at which events of trauma cannot necessarily be consciously or explicitly remembered or be grieved and memorialized in the past and at which the maddeningly persistent presence of traumatizing somatic and sensory ghosts must be contained, repressed and where possible, destroyed (Rothschild 2000, 44). Being traumatized is to occupy a nightmarish spatial, corporeal, and psychological “non-place” (Augé 1995) in which the future can only be entered into through an impossible engagement with the past. As Rothschild (2000, 36) argues, “Traumatic experiences freefloat in time without an end or place in history.” “Smashed” Embodiments As already discussed, trauma was very much evident in the life stories and everyday conduct of many young homeless people taking part in my research. Many young people explicitly reported histories of abuse and other traumatic events, and I encountered young homeless people who also reported diagnosed dissociative mental disorders traditionally associated with sexual and physical abuse, such as personality disorders. A majority of young people discussed the range of coping mechanisms commonly connected to experiences of abuse-related trauma, as discussed earlier, such as drug and alcohol misuse, self-harm, and suicidal behaviors. As well as experiencing trauma and trauma-related disorders, young people faced other issues relating to their coping style, such as drug and

Beside One’s Self | 69 alcohol addiction, which themselves required complex and specialized support responses and constituted major barriers to maintaining housing and housing relationships. Coping mechanisms such as alcohol and drug abuse, self-harm, and suicidal behavior have been widely understood as central in the numbing and alleviation of the pain of intrusive body memories of sexual and physical abuse, in escaping from or forgetting problems and in dealing with emotional distress and anxiety. And while of course these behaviors may also develop entirely unconnected to underlying trauma histories, their coincidence with self-reported sexual and physical abuse and other trauma in my own and other research on homelessness reinforces the fact that the felt effects of trauma and the complicated behaviors these lead to, should be understood as critically important issues to consider in policy and service responses to young people’s homelessness. In the extremely stressful context of homelessness in which young people had scarce access to trauma support and were rarely stable in one geographical location, the establishment of kinds of chemically induced “holding patterns” through drug and alcohol use in particular made absolute sense. Young people seemed to reflect and even reinforce their suspension in possible trauma by taking further measures to bolster their own displacement from “dangerous” body and place memories (Young 1992, 95). In other words, rather than perhaps being able to process and resolve traumatic pasts—a near impossibility in the chaos, stress, and dayto-day survival of homelessness—young people sought temporary refuge from continued somatic discomfort and from the inevitable surfacing or “kindling” (Grillon, Southwick, and Charney 1996, 288) of traumatic memories, predominantly by becoming absent from the body through chronic abuse of drugs and alcohol. “Getting smashed” and “going on benders” by drinking to unconsciousness or by spending days “scattered” on amphetamines or “drugfucked” by paint fumes or heroin enabled young people to become disembodied and thus temporarily absent from the range of problems they faced in homelessness and from their somatic haunting by the terrors of past homes. In what can be understood as attempts to keep the still remembering body at bay, through chronic drug and alcohol use

70 | Beside One’s Self young people engaged in a ferocious double displacement of their bodies, a disembodiment from their already displaced body-in-pain. As Sam explained, “They’re doing it to get through, to escape reality, because the reality of their life at the moment is shit, they’re on the street . . . Sometimes you do it just to escape reality, which is why I started drugs.” Four young women, three of whom also explicitly discussed experiences of physical and sexual abuse, likewise explained their chronic drug and alcohol usage as an escape mechanism: .

pe ta: Yes, I was drinking to the point where I would go unconscious. I couldn’t pick up a drink without going unconscious. So it’s not like I loved the feeling of being drunk, it was more I did it to escape fully, and whether I died, I died. And I guess that I would, when I would drink, I could have the guts to kill myself if I had the chance and I wouldn’t care. ja n i n e: I’d gone from being a really high achiever to just wanting to see how far, wanting to fuck my life as far as possible it could go. I just wanted to destroy my life and that’s what I started doing taking drugs. h e len: Well, with hindsight I think I drank as a rebellious teenage girl. I drank too much but I drank when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, so quite heavily, often. I think probably to dull the pain and what was going on. a nge: Like personally, I don’t like being straight. Like I handle things better when I’m off my head. Like lots of problems I don’t have to think about. I can just sit back, be in my own little world sorta thing, not think about problems. Yet when I’m straight, I’ve got all these problems you know, so if I was smashed I wouldn’t know who was walking past you know, wouldn’t care you know . . . I was that smashed all the time that I didn’t really care where I was sleeping. I’d just pass out. I didn’t care.

It became clear in my research that such excessive drug and alcohol use had enormous impacts on young people’s vulnerability to further abuse and on their capacity to maintain supported and independent accommodation. Most refuges refused to accommodate young people when they were intoxicated, and case planning with refuge clients would often

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involve reduction in drug and alcohol use and commitment to rehabilitation—achievements on which the continued provision of accommodation and casework would often depend. Young people were evicted from youth refuges if they used drugs on-site, and if they returned to refuges intoxicated they could be given “time out”—a period of hours—in which to try and sober up. Inevitably, however, because of consistent intoxication or because of unacceptable behavior such as becoming violent toward workers or other clients while intoxicated on site, young people would be evicted for days from a service or, in rarer cases, be barred from returning to the service altogether. As Tony explained: You get a sore stomach in the morning and you feel just really exhausted when you don’t have it [heroin] and you feel all depressed and you can’t be bothered doing anything . . . It’s just not worth it . . . all the side effects and you just can’t do nothing . . . and you just look terrible and you get kicked out of your hostel.

In independent accommodation, drug and alcohol misuse proved similarly destructive to both housing relationships and to tenancy itself as Tony also described: I had a good relationship with my tenants and landlord and then umm, one of my friends come and see me one night with some heroin, and then . . . and then, umm, my landlord came and kicked me out.

Drug and alcohol use could be engaged in freely while living in squats, but young squatters remained even more marginalized from the possibility of trauma support, health care, and drug and alcohol support, including clean injecting equipment (see Robinson 2003b). Further, when young people remained in squats because of their addictions they also remained more vulnerable to further violence and victimization. The chaotic, high stress, and risky lifestyle of serious drug using in itself also provided a major distraction from unresolved problems, including trauma. Young people could end up totally enmeshed in chaotic drug-using lifestyles that also lead inevitably to eviction, homelessness, legal and health issues, and even hospitalization. Micah and Janine described the extreme instability of their drug-using lifestyles:

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mic a h: It was just a full-on, non-stop, speed stop. Every speed addict in town used to come to that place. And it was just chockers full of addicts every day. You’d have six people in this room, four people in this room and kids running everywhere . . . Shit just happened and coppers coming around and looking for such and such and looking for [my boyfriend] and looking for this bloke and that bloke. So it was constantly on our toes all the time . . . ja n i n e: What had happened was we got evicted because the units had security passes, really nice units, and you had like a buzzer to your unit and there was like a door and stairwell. And someone had come out of my unit to go home and he had made it out of my front door but he hadn’t made it to the bottom of the stairs, he’d passed out, dropped or something in the stairwell. And one of the old grannies came out and saw this guy Jim lying in the stairwell off his gullets, you know, from our unit. And I had an overdose at my unit and four people had all overdosed on heroin at one time, and one of those people had died and the police were there and the ambulance were there. So the combination of that, the people that lived on the top floor of the units, they owned their unit and they were on the Body Corporate and they complained to the real estate so I got evicted.

As also noted earlier, when the chaos of being homeless and in particular of drug using eased, the problems from which young people had managed to displace themselves through “smashing” the remembering body resurfaced: c at h er i n e: So how does this flat change how things were before? ta mi e: I don’t have the constant worry of where I’m gonna be . . . I’ve got the hassle of worrying about other things instead of thinking about accommodation. c at h er i n e: Would you consider yourself homeless? ta mi e: No. c at h er i n e: But have you been? ta mi e: I have been. c at h er i n e: What was that like? How did that make you feel?

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ta mi e: Worried, frustrated, angry, confused . . . c at h er i n e: So how’s that different to how things are now . . . if it is? ta mi e: It’s still like that sometimes but not for the same reasons . . . for different reasons .  .  . Things that have happened in the past that I’ve blocked out . . . and now I don’t have the hassle of looking around for accommodation . . . I don’t know what I’m going to do . . .

The beginning of any period of stabilization for young people fortunate enough to access independent accommodation was a precarious time then in which it would become clear whether they were yet ready and adequately supported to move on from the addictive, familiar, and distracting lifestyle of homelessness (Downing-Orr 1996, 165). Most commonly, young homeless people seemed to engage in many cycles of chronic drug and alcohol use and chronic homelessness, followed by drug rehabilitation and then stabilization in supported accommodation. Though young people would sabotage their accommodation and drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, service providers understood young people as moving ever closer with each cycle to the possibility of stability and to addressing underlying problems. Ultimately, however, through repetitively inducing a protective sense of disembodiment by getting smashed, young people created another major barrier to safety and accommodation—drug and alcohol addiction—which often masked the presence of any underlying trauma to outside observers. In consistently engaging smashed and numbed forms of disembodiment, young people only further papered over trauma and further withdrew the possibility of accessing safe places in which remembering, grieving, and healing trauma might take place. In particular and in practical terms, the coexistence of substance abuse, trauma distress, and trauma disorders made it very difficult to access both already scarce mental health support and rehabilitation services, leaving young people trapped and out of control. In rehabilitation, Peta, for example, felt that only her “secondary” issue of drug and alcohol misuse was addressed, and she remained frustratingly unsupported with a personality disorder associated with sexual abuse that in turn underpinned her misuse of drugs and alcohol:

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Like it’s always been I’ve been helped with the symptoms of my disorder, rather than the disorder itself . . . Like I’ve been to rehab and they were more drug focused . . . They could not cope with the primary need, they could only cope with the secondary needs but therefore they felt they weren’t helping me because it wasn’t dealing, they weren’t trained in the area that . . . so it was just a “catch 22” sort of thing. They would rather take people in that would fit their primary problem first, where it was more focused on drugs and alcohol being the primary problem. My needs weren’t being met.

In general, as Peta’s experience suggests, the interweaving of sexual and physical abuse and drug and alcohol misuse could not only become an extremely complex barrier to early intervention in homelessness, but a long-term threat to the stability of young people’s mental and general health and housing. Given the extreme difficulty of processing trauma and the layers of symptomatic problems that can develop as a result of trauma, young people could become caught in cycles of further abuse and homelessness throughout the life course, a situation to which the lack of coordinated and long-term support service provision contributed. “Wounding to Heal” Although some service providers understood chronic drug and alcohol use as a part of many young people’s way of coping with trauma, self-harm, and suicidal and violent behaviors were much less well tolerated in both accommodation and drop-in services, even though these too can be understood as closely connected to underlying vulnerabilities stemming from physical and sexual abuse, as already noted. In attempting to provide an environment of safety for all their clients and without reliable support from mental health crisis teams, refuges refused accommodation to known violent young people and were reluctant to take young people known to selfharm or to struggle with suicidal behaviors. Ange, for example, pointed to the familiar practice of revolving through the range of crisis refuges: a nge: I’ve been to all the different refuges, you know. I’ve been kicked out of every single one in New South Wales basically. For my behavior in refuges and stuff like that.

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c at h er i n e: So what behavior’s that? a nge: Violence. Abusing people, bashing people, you know.

Young people, like Sam, also reported losing independent accommodation because of their self-harm or suicide attempts, either because they had to remain for a period in hospital care or because landlords and housemates refused to allow them to stay: c at h er i n e: Have you ever had to leave a place because your mental health’s gone downhill? sa m: Yeah, a boarding house at New Farm. That’s where I stabbed myself in the stomach. They walked in, the guy heard me like make a scream or cry or something and he’s broken down the door and come in, got me to hospital. I went back there two days later after they let me out of hospital. Well, they didn’t let me, I had to discharge myself, but after I left the hospital I went back there and he said that he couldn’t have someone down there like me, which to me means he said he couldn’t have someone there with a mental problem and that’s discrimination really.

The absolute frustration and hopelessness stemming from entrapment in cycles of trauma, illness, and homelessness was expressed in young people’s self-harm and suicide attempts in particular. In turn, as already noted, such actions often only served to further lock young people into contexts of extreme psychological and physical suffering and further experiences of homelessness. Peta, who had also self-reported sexual and physical abuse, and Sam, who had also reported physical abuse, discussed the cycle of desperation leading to their suicide attempts: pe ta: I left home at about nineteen. Well, I was literally, I had to leave because of the violence. My dad’s physical, emotional violence, psychological abuse and I just yeah . . . I’d had nervous breakdowns and when I came out of rehab I attempted suicide because of the violence. I went [from] rehab straight to their home and I couldn’t handle it. I had breakdowns after breakdowns. sa m: I stabbed myself in the stomach and that’s just because it’s too hard, you give up, too hard to find a place to stay .  .  . I get more depressed,

76 | Beside One’s Self I get sometimes suicidal and it’s for that reason, ’cause now I’ve got to work harder than I know how to find a place to stay and there just isn’t anywhere.

It is a bitter and tragic irony that Sam lost his boarding house accommodation because of his self-harm and that Peta was sent back to her abusive family home after being told, “Look we’ll sew you up and you just go home . . . It’ll be all right, you’ll get through it. Just give it time . . .” Sam and Peta’s situations are good examples, however, of the intensity, circularity, and inescapability of pain being experienced by many young homeless people. For Sam and Peta, this is a level of pain that threatens to overwhelm and is dealt with through the self-infliction of physical injuries. Specifically, it is the body as a carrier of “bad” emotional memory that must be cut away (Harris 2000, 166). For Rameshwari Rao (2006, 52), the process of self-harm can be understood as the logical replacement of overwhelming, uncontrollable, catastrophic pain with specific, visible, containable, physical pain. As Rao (ibid., 51) simply states, “mutilating one’s self becomes a welcome possibility” as, for the cutter, mutilation “momentarily frees her from the ‘stuckness’ of suffering” (ibid., 56). “Wounding to heal” makes sense, then, as Rao (ibid., 56) suggests, when wounding is understood as a tool used to address being “stuck in despair.” Wounding is a tool used to both release and displace the pain stemming from the “wound beneath the wound” (ibid., 56). In sum, those who self-harm may be understood to use “physical pain as a way to cope with emotional pain” (Harris 2000, 167). Self-harm may enable and effect a temporary safe return to and even enjoyment of the body in the sense that bad emotional memory is momentarily cut away by the infliction of immediate physical injuries. Both cutting and getting smashed may be experienced as healing practices because of associated feelings of well-being generated by the temporary freedom, taken for granted by many, from traumatic body memory. Such experiences of bodily return and healing, however, are premised on “the desire to cut oneself loose from the body, to be rid of it once and for all” (Young 1992, 98). They also remain premised on practices of

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disembodiment that must be repeated and become in their repetition also disembodying. As addiction to self-harm grows Rao (2006, 51) suggests, so too does bodily alienation, and lost is the sense of bodily control initially associated with cutting. Like getting smashed, cutting brings “disconnection from self, others, and world” and repeats the callous infliction of pain and vulnerability associated with original painful, traumatic events (ibid., 51). The ability to imagine “cutting, burning, starving, or shooting oneself” comes precisely through the dislocation of trauma survivors “from bodies that are not them” (Young 1992, 98), a corporeal displacement and disembodiment that is substantially reinforced through actually enacting such violence. Like substance abuse, cutting can be understood as a “double-edged” “healing ritual” (Rao 2006, 51) or strategy through which trauma relief might be sought but only through the further reentrenchment of pain and disembodiment. For the cutter, Rao (ibid., 56) argues, “The act of selfcutting pulls her together only to tear her apart with its self-destructive, shaming, and addictive consequences.” Although getting smashed and cutting may allow a reoccupation of the body temporarily released from emotional anguish, “At what price?” asks Young (1992, 99). A Primal Homelessness As well as trying to provide an account of the forms of corporeal displacement effected by trauma and the management of trauma with which many young homeless people struggle, my central concern has also been to illustrate the ways in which these bodily displacements are intimately connected with the experience and perpetuation of homelessness. Not only do young people initially become homeless because of traumatic events but their ongoing trajectories of homelessness and housing instability are significantly driven by the disembodying impacts of trauma. Although it is important to note that not all who experience traumatic events will experience PTSD (Rothschild 2000, 6), the prevalence of PTSD among homeless people is very high (Bassuk et al. 1998, 1562; Browne 1993, 377; Goodman, Saxe, and Harvey 1991, 1219; Taylor and Sharpe 2008, 209). Further, it is also the case that the experience of multiple traumas, such as

78 | Beside One’s Self is likely in the experience of those homeless, increases the prevalence of PTSD (Buhrich, Hodder, and Teesson 2000, 965). As such, definitions of homelessness should more clearly articulate the central role of trauma both as a cause of homelessness and as an intimate component of being homeless. Further, for some, homelessness could usefully be understood as displacement from the body through trauma, a context in which the continual loss of housing becomes one presenting indicator of a more radical form of corporeal homelessness. Specifically, trauma from sexual and physical abuse is experienced as a bodily state of displacement in which painfully disruptive somatic, sensory memories haunt young homeless people and cannot be resolved. In seeking to repress and further separate themselves from these uncontrollable felt consequences of trauma events, young people inflict further pain on their bodies, rendering themselves senseless by getting smashed and cutting away their bodies, by seeking unconsciousness and even death. In turn, these coping mechanisms entrench young people’s sense of disembodiment and bodily alienation and further displace them from pathways to healing. Traumatic disembodiment condemns many young people to extreme vulnerability and chaotic trajectories of homelessness that begin within the family home and extend into street homelessness, squatting, refuge cycling, and forms of temporary, unsafe accommodation. Young people are made homeless through being forced into the nonplace of trauma, through being forced into the placelessness, timelessness, and bodilessness of trauma to which their lack of stable housing only gestures. Through exclusion from their own bodies, young people are severed from the capacity to be at home with themselves. They can be made psychically homeless, but also radically, primally homeless at the site of their own bodies, robbed of the necessary orienting body and place memories and habituations that enable practical emplacement in the world. Being in place is tied first to being in the place of the body, and so Young (1992, 99) announces the primal homelessness many young people must struggle to overcome: “To occupy a body filled with pain, gutted by pain, is to experience a body that is finally, uninhabitable.”

3 “Doing the Geographical” Still more dire is the experience of being unplaced, which constant movement brings with it. Not only may the former place be lost but a new place in which to settle may not be found. With increased mobility and range comes increased risk, above all the risk of having no proper or lasting place, no place to be or remain. —Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World

T hough displacemen t may begin with dislocation from the psychological and corporeal territories that constitute somatic geography, also triggered in homelessness are trajectories of a broader physical placelessness. Not only do homeless people experience traumatic places but they experience the trauma of being without places of “sanctuary” (Goodman, Saxe, and Harvey 1991, 1220). Places of memorial and habitual connection, places that open a sense of safety and familiarity such that the self can be at once reinforced and forgotten, are vanquished. It is the struggle for home and for place, the tiring transience of “the experience of being unplaced,” as Casey describes in the chapter epigraph, which remains always central to homelessness felt and lived. This chapter examines dislocation from places of sanctuary as a second mode of displacement experienced by young homeless people. I focus on their stressful experiences of geographic displacement within urban landscapes, in particular their experiences of “doing the geographical” as Tara—still recurrently homeless at age thirty-three—described it. I am 79

80 | Beside One’s Self interested here in how young homeless people live out and survive trajectories of dislocation, moving not only from their often dangerous family homes but through countless street-living sites and temporary forms of accommodation, through suburbs, cities, and across state borders, remaining at times lost and always vulnerable and unsettled. Although transience in itself can become a technique of displaced survival, alongside the multiple forms of distress young people may be dealing with they must nonetheless attempt to cope with the negative physical, emotional, and psychological impacts of geographic dislocation and isolation associated with living homeless and also with the pressing practical problems presented by life lived without a secure or safe home base. In the context of often hectic and uncontrolled movement through place not only do young people struggle to form positive place attachments, they struggle to maintain access to any safe place at all. Young people live displaced from the social and psychological benefits of geographical embeddedness, and further, must struggle to inhabit places that do not simply reinforce or even worsen their sense of placelessness and vulnerability. They may be nowhere in the nonplace of trauma as discussed in chapter 2, but they are also “going nowhere” and have nowhere to be, geographically displaced from home, excluded from the city, existing “in a perpetual state of movement” (Kawash 1998, 327). As Veness (1993, 324–25) argues, however, “Homeless people live somewhere, they carry out personal activities in real places even though those activities may be curtailed and constrained,” and indeed young homeless people’s experiences of geographic displacement were not straightforwardly those of complete placelessness. Although young people found it extremely difficult to establish and maintain place relations, not only did they have to live somewhere but they also actively searched for places that offered stability, peace and a chance to recover and reorient themselves. Kawash (1998, 327) insists that “the homeless are forced into constant movement not because they are going somewhere, but because they have nowhere to go,” and yet in my research I found that young homeless people routinely and strategically went somewhere in particular, even if this was a transitory and marginalizing somewhere. Somewhere, for young homeless people, could be both a practical resource-rich survival

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space—a squat, for instance—or a place with “therapeutic” benefits often associated with home (Kearns and Smith 1993, 267)—such as a quiet place for reading and reflection in the botanical gardens. Geographical displacement, then, cannot simply be understood as placelessness, first because of the necessary placedness of the body—a point Kawash (1998, 329) makes also—and second because of the struggle for place to which displacement immediately gives rise. As Casey’s phenomenological or, perhaps more correctly, “geophilosophical” (Casey 2001, 403) work suggests, geographical displacement can usefully be understood as both a significant experience of personal, social, and cultural disorientation and, indeed, “desolation” (Casey 1993, 192) and as a necessary part of a broader spatial process of “getting back into place” (ibid.). Geographical displacement is not understood by Casey as a permanent place-relation but as a traumatic spatial experience that can nonetheless give over to a new psychophysical knowledge of being-in-place. In particular, through grieving “lost places,” “displacement can give way to reimplacement in a new landscape” (ibid., 199; see also Robinson 2005). In terms of framing the felt dimension of homelessness and indeed the lived negotiation of the seemingly uninhabitable and placeless landscape of urban homelessness, Casey’s work offers an important window into understanding both the paralysis of “place-panic” and the necessary and ongoing struggle for emplacement. Although Casey (1993, x) indicates that “place-panic” associated with displacement can be experienced as a blinding fear of being forever “without place,” he warns against the complete polarization of displacement as placelessness. We are reminded that “to exist at all as a (material or mental) object or (an experienced or observed) event is to have a place—to be implaced, however minimally or imperfectly or temporally” (ibid., 13). Here we have an empowering concept of displacement that in fact grounds an acknowledgment of the resilient being-through-place of embodied subjects and thus of the subject’s fundamental place connectedness. Place is an ember of being with which one may lose contact, but that never quite dies out. Thus, though for Susanne M. Dumbleton (2005, 60) “people who wander alone, with no geographic center, no sense of place, become disoriented in space and time,” even for those young homeless people who

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experienced the full fracturing effects of corporeal trauma discussed in chapter 2, Casey’s work can be used to imply that in their continued survival there always remains hope of relocation in body, time, and geographical place. Likewise, such hope is also identified by Tomas and Dittmar (1995, 511) in the “psychological strength” of homeless women experiencing life histories of place devastation. In the context of research on homelessness, Casey’s work on displacement is mirrored in particular in the important and growing literature on the “place-making” (Ruddick 1996, 51; see also Wright 1997, 253) and “home-making” (Rivlin and Moore 2001, 323) activities undertaken by homeless people. Such work has illuminated homeless people’s confrontation and negotiation of “the imminent possibility of there being no place to be or to go” (Casey 1993, ix) through their construction of alternative and meaningful homeplaces within the context of homelessness and poverty. Researchers have documented the making of homeplaces in refuges, in squats, in convenient street sites, in encampments in liminal urban zones, and in housing considered “unacceptable” as home (see, for example, Hill 1991; Passaro 1996; Robinson 2003b; Veness 1993; Wagner 1993; Williams 1996). They have also traced the patterns of mobility through which homeless people seek out the practical necessities of day-to-day living and maintain wider social networks of services, friends, and family (see, for example, Wolch and Rowe 1992). As Robert Ginsberg (1999, 35) suggests, “The world offers many places that feel just like home for people trying to get somewhere.” Strategies to cope with geographical displacement are developed in relation to a careful assessment of the place-making tactics different kinds of urban spaces can support (Snow and Mulchay 2001; Rivlin and Imbimbo 1989, 715). Rowe and Wolch (1990, 184) describe, for example, how women homeless in Los Angeles employ new geographies of survival in response to the multiple geographical displacements of homelessness, addressing the “time-space discontinuity” effected by homelessness by remapping place and time routines associated with homed life within new street-based networks. These new networks hinge on the continuity provided by “home-bases” established through intimate relationships and street camps and on routinized interaction with the homed at fixed

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locations such as when panhandling or when visiting services (Rowe and Wolch 1990). Drawing on Michel de Certeau, Susan Ruddick (1996) celebrates such tactical “reappropriation” (de Certeau 1984, 96) of space by homeless people, arguing that “to stay in place” (Ruddick 1996, 61) and to gain even a “relative permanence in particular places,” “the homeless make fleeting, transitory uses of spaces that have been strategically organised by other actors, that is, those who have title to space and to property” (ibid., 59). Indeed, walking, as one of de Certeau’s (1984, 91) key poetic disruptions of the city, could, for example, be seen in the context of homelessness as a central tactic of place making that supports multiple daily functions such as entertainment, transport, invisibility, filling time, social networking, and resource gathering. In among the disciplinary urban structure, through walking homeless people lay down “spatial stories” (ibid., 115) of their own, gleaning the multiple resources city-space offers that remain unneeded, and therefore unseen, by the homed. As the maps of the daily paths of homeless women and of streetfrequenting young people in Rowe and Wolch’s (1990) and Robinson’s (1998, 2000) work reveal, meaningful time-space trajectories are paced out by the marginalized through and even underneath the city. These trajectories weave together services, homed contacts, significant public spaces, and secret or private places of rest and retreat. The value of specific tactical sites is extended by the place claim of walking itself, through which the sites are woven together in an invisible geography. As is further discussed in chapter 4, the construction of such orienting geographies in turn defines a broader locale within which a continuity of not just space and time, but selfhood and self-esteem, might also be maintained (Rowe and Wolch 1990, 190, 201). As Lisa Bostock (2001) argues, however, for low-income single mothers in the Midlands (UK), walking is not experienced as tactical or liberating as for the poetic pedestrians in de Certeau’s work, but as stressful and as a contributing factor to mothers’ and their children’s ill-health and social isolation. Although Bostock’s work throws into relief the uncritical emphasis in current health policy on the need to increase physical activity, her research also helps to temper the celebration of the geographical

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survival tactics of the homeless that may likewise ultimately reinforce stress, ill-health, risk, and marginalization (see also Wolch and Rowe 1992, 117–18). As Kawash (1998, 328) notes, for de Certeau, “to walk is to lack a place,” and although movement and the transitory occupation of particular, liminal, urban spaces may indeed be the necessitated guerrilla tactics of homeless survival, such tactics can also simply deepen and continually perpetuate the psychological and physical suffering of living without place attachment. Further, transitory occupations of place may also help to entrench the ideological and practical perpetration of the nonexistence of homeless people in public space that Kawash (1998) discusses. To again recall Casey (2001, 406), “there is . . . no self without place” (see also Fullilove 1996, 1518). Although it is critical to understand both the types of places homeless people rely on in survival and the forms of “spatial contestations” they employ (Snow and Mulchay 2001), whether through networking and walking and other forms of mobility or through holding out the city in interstitial encampments, it is also just as critical to understand the risk, desolation, and desperation of survival in the margins. As Rowe and Wolch (1990, 191) make clear, the kinds of transitory places most often available to homeless women are predominantly found within “devalued locales” that often present terrifying environmental and interpersonal dangers to homeless people and precisely undermine self-esteem and selfidentity (see also Bostock 2001). Further, the reconfiguration of survival networks by women within already devalued locales is seen by Rowe and Wolch (1990, 201) to mitigate “against developing both the means, and the will, to execute long-term projects aimed at re-entering mainstream society.” In other words, although sociospatial networks might be the key to women’s practical and emotional survival, they fully involve women in short-term survival practices that often further estrange them from reestablishing independent, homed lives. Kawash (1998, 335) bluntly reinforces the limitations of place making by the placeless: “I take a pessimistic view on the question of the subversive power of homeless presence or activities to challenge public meanings or exclusions.” She argues that even the services dedicated to supporting and accommodating homeless people largely reflect the compulsion of city

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dwellers to lighten the burden of homelessness both by keeping homeless people moving and by keeping them contained to the smallest possible geographical and bodily space (ibid., 327, 331). Temporary accommodation services arguably discourage, through short support time frames, through rules, expulsions and bans, the “thickly-lived” (Casey 2001, 407) place relations that might in fact allow a sustaining and healing sense of habitation (Kawash 1998, 327; Rivlin and Imbimbo 1989, 711–14). As Veness (1994, 163; see also Williams 1996) also notes, some accommodation services reproduce and enforce unfamiliar and idealized notions of home and “homed” behavior that further perpetuate homeless people’s sense of alienation from the possibilities of both “home as residence” and home as a place of belonging and rootedness (May 2000, 738). Like Kawash, Jon May (ibid.) also remains pessimistic about the felt impacts of transience and placelessness marking many homeless people’s lives. May (ibid., 749) illustrates the physical and existential placelessness homeless people both endure and attempt to respond to in their ongoing “search for a feeling of home as place.” For May, the geographical displacements of homelessness are lived not just as a battle “to stay in place” (Ruddick 1996, 61) but to be in place, to belong and feel rooted, to feel at home. Constant movement through place, however, as May (2000, 738) suggests, has extremely negative impacts on both homeless people’s attempts to establish “home as residence” and “home as place.” The double struggle for home as residence and place is lived then as a doubled insecurity that the single homeless men taking part in May’s work are unable to resolve. As May (ibid., 747) shows, the continual displacements marking homeless people’s highly transient lifestyles “simply extend a sense of homelessness as lack of residence to homelessness as lack of place.” Transience, even through resourceful places such as hostels, reinforces “feelings of disorientation and isolation” and feeds a more fundamental anxiety about belonging and feeling at home in place (ibid., 755). The constant turnover of place reflects in both May’s and my own research not the rhythmic, placed journeying of nomads but a consistently unsettled and sometimes lifelong vagrancy in which homeless people experience both a lack of control over place and a kind of feverish drive to both quash nagging feelings of dislocation and yearnings for home.

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The constant erosion of place in vagrancy gives critical context for understanding the limited possibilities of homemaking for homeless people “who move in continual search of home and of place not merely lost but (perhaps) irretrievable” (ibid., 755). Highlighted in May’s work is the existential suffering attached to movement that continues even after home as residence is—temporarily—secured. Place is empty, “hollowed-out,” and home remains always deferred (ibid., 755) for those who are homeless “in their souls” (Stephenson 2006, 167). I move on now to illustrate how placelessness and place making as the conflicting felt and lived vectors of geographical displacement are negotiated by young homeless people. Overall, I work to build a picture of how young people experience the extremes of repeated geographical dislocation in the landscape of homelessness, of how they negotiate the trauma, stress, and exhaustion of placelessness and seek to carve out places for rest, return, and reflection. I begin with an examination of young people’s felt-experiences of “hollowed-out” (May 2000, 755) or “thinned-out” (Casey 2001, 406) places in which they can never settle and in which they experience only the barest of shelter. As Casey (2001, 407) argues, however, “Places . . . can never become utterly thinned out,” and inevitably, young people did find places that offered “hold.” In responding to and managing the experience of dislocation, in “found spaces” (Rivlin and Imbimbo 1989, 714) young people gathered survival resources in safety, in company—if sought—and in some comfort. Further, some identified special “spacefull” places of reflection in which both the past and the future could begin to be addressed. As I will argue, however, such found and spacefull places of physical and existential sanctuary remained always precarious and sometimes momentary in the broader context of displacement that young people faced. “Hollowed-out” Place: Trajectories of Placelessness As for the single homeless men participating in May’s research, in their chaotic geographies of homelessness, place for young people was rendered “hollowed-out” by the constant dissolution of fragile place embeddedness and place-based social networks (May 2000, 747). Geographical displacement was felt and lived by young people not only as extreme

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transience but as an intensely depressing alienation within physically repelling places as well as alienation from desperately desired places of care, comfort, and security. Similarly to the narratives of women participants in Tomas and Dittmar’s (1995) study, young people’s descriptions of the places they moved through remained remarkably devoid of a sense of place and of home. Instead, they discussed the high turnover of empty, “toxic” (Fullilove 1996, 1517), and unwelcoming places with which they struggled to form any connection at all. For young homeless people, placelessness extended from abusive and chaotic family homes into ongoing cycles of temporary housing and homelessness. Young people were nowhere through being “here, there, and everywhere” as Ange and Richard described: a nge: Oh, I was here, there, and everywhere, if you know what I mean, just staying wherever I could, wherever. r ic h a rd: I was in detoxes and around here and everywhere, just doing the whole scene, just kept going around squats, stuff like that.

Likewise, Janine and Micah illustrated the rootless and risky occupation of place many experienced. Both young women were living in short-term supported accommodation when I met them, and they described for me their multiple movements through housing in different areas of Brisbane since first leaving home. They discussed hectic trajectories of placelessness marked by poor mental health and drug addiction. Distinctly absent in their discussions was a sense of a lasting home base or orienting place attachment. Janine cycled through so many different suburbs and forms of housing she could not remember them all, and Micah graphically illustrated dire experiences of living in squatlike conditions, in fear of the police, and while trying to care for other people’s children in isolation and poverty. Neither a sense of home as residence nor the wider sense of belonging May (2000) describes as home as place surfaced in these interviews. Janine rather mechanically reeled off a disoriented place past, and Micah described her lonely entrapment in a stressful underworld of drug use: ja n i n e: And I started wanting to get off drugs and I went into a detox and I decided while I was in the detox that I didn’t want to live with my

88 | Beside One’s Self parents any more and I moved into a unit at Windsor by myself. I moved in with another girl first and it didn’t work out. Then I moved into a unit at Windsor by myself and I lived there for a while and stayed off drugs for about three months. Then I started using again, so I went to rehab in New South Wales and when I came out of there I didn’t have anywhere to go. I left there and I was on the streets. c at h er i n e: In the streets in Brisbane or . . . ? ja n i n e: In Brisbane yeah. I don’t know where I went from there . . . I think after I lived on the streets, that’s when I came here [women’s refuge] for the first time. I got kicked out of here twice for violence and drug use. I was banned from here, and where’d I go from there? I don’t remember. I know, I ended up living at, after I went to that rehab [in New South Wales] I was homeless for a while, I don’t know if I was here during that time or not, I ended up with an organization . . . over at Woolloongabba [Brisbane], yeah that’s where I went after [rehab] and I lived there [in a boarding house]. And I lived there for about six months and I was using drugs there. I changed drugs though from heroin to speed and I lived there for about six months and I started going to Alcoholics Anonymous and they cleaned my act right up and I stayed clean for nine months and I got transferred from the boarding house . . . to a unit, a one bedroom unit. I lived there for nine months and I got a job over in Aspley and I bought a car . . . I moved over to a unit in Nunda, a private rental with a couple of friends and I lived there for about nine months and then I starting using drugs again and I lost my job and that was about two years ago, maybe a bit more than two years ago. I lost my job and I lived out my car for eight months till it ran out of registration. I lost my job in January and by August of that year, 1998 or 1999, I lost, my car ran out of rego, and I was back on the streets. And during that time I was on the streets. That’s been the last . . . till six months ago, that’s been the last two years I’ve been homeless . . . There’s a couple of places I forgot too. I lived over at Kangaroo Point too, but I don’t remember the circumstances around that. mic a h: From there I moved, we ended up, we were all on the streets the four of us and the two kids and for about two weeks we ended up meeting a young couple and crashing on their floor. Then Lou managed to get

“Doing the Geographical” | 89 a house in Caboolture. It was an absolute shit-hole, just a place to live. We ended up getting a bond loan and stuff like that. The place had, because it was so close to the river, it had cracks in the walls because of the foundations moving, so it was a bit dodgy but at that stage we lived there for a few months. It was just a full-on, non-stop, speed-stop. Every speed addict in town used to come to that place, and it was just chockers full of addicts all day every day. You’d have six people in this room, four people in this room and kids running everywhere. And it started slowly that I’d be the baby sitter of all of them . . . They hardly ever slept, they were in diapers at the age of two and three, drinking out of bottles, never any food in the house, and the kids get to your self-esteem a bit. When their own parents can’t look after their own kids . . . And if they ever ate at all it’d be dry noodles. Lou couldn’t cook and so Geoff and I, Geoff mostly would do the cooking and she would do the cleaning whenever she got a shot of speed. She’d go clean the place up at a hundred miles an hour and my self-esteem just slowly went down the toilet. Shit just happened and coppers coming around and looking for such and such, and looking for Geoff, and looking for this bloke and that bloke. So it was constantly on our toes every time the coppers would come to the door because it’d be a matter of “who are they coming to get?” And from there we ended up moving in with two young blokes and that was all right because at that stage they didn’t use [drugs]. But drugs follow you everywhere, and the first time they became speed addicts . . . their lives just got way out of hand as well. They ended up getting themselves in too deep and got themselves in two grand’s [A$2000] worth of debt. They bought speed, they were supposed to cut it and sell it, but they ended up using the whole lot with their mates and had people coming around looking for them and wanting to break their kneecaps and stuff like that and fucking, that went down the toilet. We ended up, we were sleeping on the cushions on the floor. That’s how we lived for three months and slowly but, I was losing all my stuff by then. Lou had all my bedding and stuff. I went back to get it and the kids had just urinated all over it, so I said have it, I don’t want it. So all I had was just the clothes that I had and my pillows and then some low life scum come in and decided to steal my fucking pillows.

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and they were great kids and we ended up moving out to Daguilar with him. And we had our own room at that stage and so for the first time I started to settle a little bit and felt like I could start again ’cause my selfesteem was way down the toilet . . . Pete and Geoff worked with Pete’s father doing demolition . . . but the sacrifice was that because we had no car and we were living out at Daguilar with next to no transport to get me in and out of town I was literally stranded with no car and I had to look after three kids and they were starting to go without food-wise and I did the best I could.

Janine and Micah described out-of-control trajectories through place that revolved around drug use. Both women seemed unable to form lasting or personally meaningful relationships with place because their movements were controlled by their ensnarement in addictions. Though Janine described one moment of longer-term stability during which she secured her own housing, a job, and a car, this then dissolved piece by piece, and her occupation of place was slowly reduced as she moved from living in her unit to living in her car to living on the streets. Though Micah had places to stay, these were “shit-holes” and “just a place to live.” She described chronic overcrowding and squatlike living conditions with little bedding, little food, little personal security and control over her property, and extremely poor and unhealthy physical environments. Further, Micah also experienced physical abuse from her boyfriend and eventually from her “friend” Pete. This abuse, the chaotic and physically degraded environments she tried to inhabit, and the extreme stress of trying to care for Pete’s and other children in geographical isolation and without support or resources were, she felt, the triggers of depression and an eventual nervous breakdown. Transience through multiple places as well as a feeling of disconnection within particular places also featured in many other young people’s narratives of place. Feelings of placelessness and homelessness arose through an inability to stay in one place for long and because of the very unstable nature of the places in themselves that young people were forced to occupy. Josie and Andy, for example, described their hollowedout trajectories of “just cruising” through the city, which revolved only

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around securing money and drugs rather than “hanging out” or dwelling in city-space: josi e: You see a lot of people on the trains . . . because . . . a lot of the time we’re fuckin’ just cruising City Rail, ay? a n dy: Just to go score. josi e: Just going places. a n dy: To make money, go score, come back . . . We don’t hang nowhere . . . We’re always a hundred percent putting our time and money into heroin . . . that’s it. Do you understand what I mean? Like when you ask, “Where do we hang out?” we don’t even hang out . . .

Likewise, Ben and Andy described seeking shelter on night trains and spending time during the day on trains and in train stations. Such places of transit were critical not in facilitating “travel from place to place” but “to pass the time without any space” (Kawash 1998, 328): ben: I was living out on the streets . . . up here [Sydney], then Bourke . . . I used to live in Wagga Wagga. c at h er i n e: So you moved from Wagga to Sydney . . . Where were you hanging out? ben: Train station. c at h er i n e: Were you sleeping there at night, or just hanging out there during the day? ben: Hang out there during the day. c at h er i n e: And where were you sleeping? ben: On the trains . . . usually the 12:09 a.m. Lithgow, ’cause it leaves at 12:09 a.m. and get back into Central at 6 a.m. I used to get the 1:30 a.m. to Springwood. c at h er i n e: Describe an average day for you when you got out of jail. What were you doing? a n dy: I’d sleep on the train on the Newcastle train or something like that . . . You’d get woken up at 6 a.m. and then jump on the train at 10 a.m. or something and it goes back and forth and you eventually get back to Central at about 6 p.m.

92 | Beside One’s Self Helen described her first three terrifying nights “on review” in a women’s short-term supported accommodation service, another transitory place designated for the transient: It was great to have somewhere to go [a women’s refuge], but it was hard ’cause I was doing an alcohol program as well. They put me in a separate part of the building and whether or not I’d stay was on a daily review for the first three days . . . I mean I tried to keep it pretty clean I suppose but it [was] filthy . . . it just almost made me sick . . . I just got a bottle of lavender oil from the supermarket and just threw it around everywhere. And that first night there was a lady in my room. I can’t remember her story, but the second night there was a different lady in the room and she was eight months pregnant . . . and left during the night to go to the hospital or something. And the third night there was a woman who’d come from another refuge because there were these Chinese Triad guys trying to kill her and they found her in the other refuge. And I’m sitting there by the open window in the stifling heat in January in Sydney with humidity, with a stinking room, stinking everything, laying there with my wallet under my pillow, not feeling safe but very thankful to have somewhere to lay my head and food in my tummy. But it was very difficult.

The movement through place young people described and the kinds of insecure places they were able to access seemed to reinforce their sense of alienation from place and from the wider social world. Helen’s description of her experience of the first three nights on review in a women’s accommodation service exudes a palpable, profound sense of loneliness and fear that was repeated in many other interviews. Young people’s transience and occupation of transient place was not tactical but psychologically damaging and emotionally devastating. As Micah repeated, the kinds of out-of-control and physically uncomfortable, depressing, and isolated places in which she and Geoff ended up negatively impacted on her health, her self-esteem, and her capacity to feel settled in place. Likewise, Sam, who was living rough on the front steps of his local Job Placement, Employment and Training Program (JPET) service in inner-city Brisbane along with his girlfriend and about twenty other young people,

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also described the desperation, depression, and low self-esteem attached to transient living and living in transient places: sa m: Like my girlfriend, her arm is all cut up at the moment, really bad. She’s got infected cuts and everything. She cut herself up pretty bad a couple of weeks ago and that was because all she could tell me was that she can’t handle the streets anymore. c at h er i n e: When you think back over all the different places that you’ve stayed, well, over nine years, how do you feel about that? sa m: Depressed. Because I don’t see what I’ve done so wrong that I can’t live like everyone else in this world, live in a house and have a house that I can call home. At the moment I say I’m going home and I’m coming to JPET, I’m coming to the steps of JPET or the car park beside it, wherever there’s a little space where me and my girlfriend can fit. And like, especially at the age of eleven, I should have been home with my parents the same as what I was telling you that there’s a young thirteen year old girl down there [at JPET], that’s the youngest one I know and she definitely should be home with her parents but she can’t be. And being on the street just, it destroys you even more than, makes you feel worse than what you already do. It makes you, you’ve got no self-esteem. I’ve lost most of my self-esteem, I’m pretty unhappy most of the time . . . It makes you turn to drugs. Like people say drugs and that is a choice, but sometimes you do it just to escape reality, which is why I started drugs.

Such feelings of unhappiness and low self-esteem not only characterized young people’s experiences of transient street living but also their experiences of transience through multiple forms of temporary accommodation. Being unable to “settle,” both in the sense of being unable to sustain accommodation but, more importantly, in terms of being unable to dwell in and become at home in place, was a key theme repeated by many young people. Young people felt alienated and depressed when living transiently either on the street or in accommodation when they could not establish a sense of rootedness in place. In other words, whether with or without shelter, without a sense of connection and settledness in place, feelings of impermanency and insecurity persisted. As Isabel and Peta

94 | Beside One’s Self described, young people both lacked and sought stability and yearned for the kinds of orienting and personal reinforcement afforded by a housed and placed existence: pe ta: So it was sort of like: my parents’ place, left, friends’ place, then couldn’t live like that, then went into housing commission, community housing, then to rehab, then from rehab to parents’ place, and parents’ place to grandparents, grandparents to [current medium-term supported housing]. c at h er i n e: So how do you feel about that whole process? pe ta: It’s just, you can never, ever settle. You’re never able to move on, or you never . . . Like everything in my life’s been temporary and there just sort of like, I didn’t know what my home was. My home wasn’t in myself because when you’re stuffed up you can’t live within yourself and if your surroundings is insecure, then you’re just all over the shop. So I mean, it was just, yeah, I couldn’t find any stability anywhere really. isabe l: I lived in three different share houses in a matter of three months. I couldn’t settle and I kept living with the wrong people or people I didn’t have much in common with. c at h er i n e: And how do you feel about this last stretch of moving around . . . ? isabe l: I want stability. I want my own place to live in for a couple of years. I just want a little flat. I just want to set up shop and do my thing and don’t have to be back by curfew . . . I feel like it hasn’t been a normal life for the last couple of years, just moving and never liking it there . . . c at h er i n e: What do you mean by stability? isabel: Just routine things that you do every day in a flat or shared flat, whatever . . . and having a cup of tea and having stability . . . I mean things all being there that are mine and that remind me of myself. Like yeah, just stability in being familiar, having familiar things around.

The stability, familiarity, self-assurance, and self-validation associated with settled-place or routinized homeplace were a long way out of reach for many young people while they were living in refuges, sleeping in carparks, or sheltering on trains or in forms of housing that did not provide

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the basics of safety and food, or while they were battling other significant issues such as mental ill health, trauma, and drug addiction when living in independent accommodation. Young people struggled to access home as residence and failed to connect home as residence with home as place. Through their temporary use of place and use of temporary places some young people described spiraling through placelessness until their own lives seemed inevitably temporary too. Young people’s occupation of place reinforced a sense of their placelessness because of the physically repelling and degraded nature of the sites over which, and within which, they exercised little control. Young people also occupied “timeless space” (Taschner and Rabinovich 1997, 27) in their momentary and forgettable inhabitations of place. Places became placeless because they yielded little physical and emotional comfort and sustenance for young people and were often places in which their physical and mental health and resilience drastically declined and in which they faced constant exposure to violence or other risks. Placeless places were too thin to support any form of meaningful or enduring dwelling. Placeless places contributed to the hollowing-out of young people themselves, to their “truncated existence” (Murphy 1999, 60). In hollow places, young people became “scattered” (Casey 2001, 406). “It destroys you,” said Sam. Found Spaces Although I have argued that the landscape of homelessness can generally be understood as a placeless one for young people, as already discussed above there are important spatial caveats to this generalization. As Rivlin and Moore (2001, 329) argue, “People who are homeless are actively engaged in managing their situations,” and, as noted, the management of placelessness is tactically undertaken by homeless people through activities of place making and home making. Within the context of geographical displacement, young people did find and construct positive places, and although these were often temporary, at least they provided respite from the overwhelming negativity of the hollowed-out and thinned-out placeless places that they were more often forced to occupy. Breaking the spiral into “nonexistence” (Kawash 1998, 328) were critical “found spaces” (Rivlin and Imbimbo 1989, 714) that offered young

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homeless people physical, mental, and emotional sustenance. Young people were able to survive and practice forms of self-care through finding and inhabiting resource-rich spaces that became “living rooms,” as Rivlin and Imbimbo (1989, 714) discuss, in which young people’s daily domestic routines took place. Found spaces were literally such privatized public spaces, spaces remade not just as living rooms but as bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens too; though unconventional and publicly accessible, they supported a range of intimate needs from sleeping to eating, allowed for self-expression and recreation, and provided safety through privacy or secrecy or through the camouflage provided by the presence of homed space users who might, however, be using the space in different ways (ibid., 714). Similarly to those homeless in New York in Rivlin and Imbimbo’s study, for homeless young people in Sydney and Brisbane, such places included public toilets, train stations, and abandoned buildings and hiding and sleeping places in the undersides of buildings, under highway bridges, in the outskirts of public parks, and in bushland and national parks. Found spaces were also woven into networks with the homes of both family and friends and the “institutional” (ibid., 711) spaces of refuges and drop-in centers. Found spaces were very important because they provided practical supports such as shelter, storage, and security, and because they were often stable and predictable sites in an otherwise chaotic daily path through the city. In effect, found spaces offered resources that kept young people going, practically and emotionally, by providing a place of return and rest, a brief sense of stability and way of organizing and structuring a day, and, at times, a place for connection with others or welcome solitude and privacy. For some young people, it was the space of the drop-in and refuge that helped regulate and stabilize daily life (this is discussed further in chapter 4). For many others, however, and as Rivlin and Imbimbo similarly found, alternative living places were constructed outside of the refuges because of entry restrictions and house rules (no beds available, bans for past behavior, no intoxication, curfews, commitment to case plans), because of the freedom, independence, and invisibility found spaces could offer, and because of the perception that sometimes

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noninstitutional space offered a greater level of safety. Jim, for example, told a fascinating story of a secret place he simply called the “tin shed.” For Jim, the physical containment of the tin shed and its secrecy made it the most peaceful place for him to be during his period of street homelessness in which he was fearful of being tracked down by his family, and in particular, by his physically abusive father: j im: The most peaceful place I found was like where no one ever knew where I was, was up on the [train] station in the tin shed. It’s down on the platform . . . There’s a big open space in there. It’s got three little rooms. It’s just like a storage shed. It’s just where they had all the junk and that . . . No one knew that I was there. c at h er i n e: So what would you do? Make somewhere to sit . . . j im: There was a big wall safe in there and so no one would find me . . . I’d sleep there at night but I’d wait ’til all the security had gone on their breaks so no one would see me walking down there and I’d walk in there and hop into the safe and close the door and no one would know I was in there. The security guards used to come around with their torches checking the rooms, but they never knew I was in there . . . c at h er i n e: So you were in some kind of box? j im: Yeah, I had a mattress, pillows, sheets and all that. c at h er i n e: So how long were you there for? j im: I was there for eight months . . . c at h er i n e: And no one saw your stuff? jim: They didn’t see the stuff ’cause, only being a short fella, I had enough room to shove it up into a corner of this safe and once the door was shut, no one knew anything . . .

The literal metaphor of the “safe” and its ultimate security were repeated in other ways in other stories. Paul talked of a special place just known as “the couch.” Paul and some friends collected a couch on “council clean-up day” (when households put old unwanted furniture out on the streets for organized collection by local area councils) and carried it through the bush to a cave they had found in cliffs in the area where they had grown up. Even though he could no longer live at home in his local area, Paul traveled to the couch to “chill out”:

98 | Beside One’s Self c at h er i n e: So how’d you get that [the couch] there? pau l: Dragged it along this trail! Took us about two hours! c at h er i n e: Why did you want to put a couch there? pau l: Just so we could go there and sit in comfort. Save sitting on the rocks. c at h er i n e: Do you go there much? pau l: Oh yeah, probably about three or four times a week. Sit there for a few hours, just chill out. c at h er i n e: So what’s good about it? pau l: Mad view! See all of Pittwater, Long Reef, right round to Curly [Curl Curl Beach]. It’s heaps good. c at h e r i n e: What else? pau l: Nobody else knows about it except all my good mates, so . . .

The buildup of intimate knowledge of place through childhood and through “hanging around” took on renewed importance in the context of homelessness. Paul, while homeless, for example, still had a place to return to and spend time with his homed friends. Several young people also talked of returning to childhood cubby houses in the bush on the outskirts of Sydney suburbs when they had nowhere else to go. This meant that young people, though excluded from a family residence, could stay around the home areas in which they grew up and with which they were geographically familiar. For Alec, camping out in old cubbies was seen as preferable to being split up from older siblings in a formal system of institutional or foster care: alec: Oh the government kicked us out ’cause she [mother] didn’t know how to look after us . . . All my brothers chose to live out on the streets so I went with them. c at h er i n e: So where did you go? alec: ’Cause I’m from out West, I had cubbies and everything out there out in the bush and that was when we slept out in a cubby out in the bush. c at h er i n e: So did your brothers look after you? alec: Yeah, we pretty much looked after each other . . . c at h er i n e: So how many of you were there?

“Doing the Geographical” | 99 alec: There was fifteen of us . . . You probably wouldn’t believe that . . . but . . . yeah. c at h er i n e: Is this in a park? alec: No, out in the bush, out in the middle of nowhere. No one knew where it was so we just felt safe out there, so just stayed out there . . . c at h er i n e: When you say cubby what do you mean? alec: Oh a little cubby built out of wood. Just knocked together. c at h er i n e: How long were you there for? alec: Oh stayed there . . . It was a while ago. I can’t really remember much of it, but um, I think we stayed there for about a year and just moved on, cruised around, stayed in different places.

Although childhood knowledge of particular suburban areas, parks, bush, and coastlines was important, discovery of special places within the city was also important, even if more difficult. Partly because of the location of many services in the inner city, eventually young people surviving in suburban and regional areas gravitated to the city out of necessity or were referred there by other youth or welfare agencies. Many young people I met had lived or continued to live in squats around the city, which were usually areas within abandoned warehouse, office, or residential space. For some, these squats were temporary and unsafe living environments; for others like Dave, the squat was a found space of pride and a space in which many of the comforts of home could be gathered: c at h er i n e: So when you say you fixed it up a bit, what do you mean? dav e: Getting all the needles and stuff out of there, air it out . . . Make it livable . . . It stunk though . . . Me and my mates had the lounge room and we put all our beds and stuff in there and then there were a couple of bedrooms so we blocked off the door to all the bedrooms and we let all the junkies stay in the bedrooms and we said, “As long as you don’t come in here it’ll be sweet. Just stay in your part. You can come in as long as you don’t leave your dirty needles laying around.” They kept on leaving dirty needles around, the coppers came around ‘cause people found out there were junkies staying there and the coppers came around and kicked out all the junkies and they said, “You can stay, you don’t have track marks, you don’t use or anything like that,” and we’re like, “You’re

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kidding aren’t you?!” And like the owner said, “You can stay, just don’t let the junkies back.” The house was going to get dozed down anyway and they let us stay there for another four months until it happened . . . and we didn’t have to pay rent or anything . . . Like with our part we kept it all tidy and we just had a couple of beds there . . . Like we bought all these beds from St. Vincent de Paul and we would carry the beds all the way up this hill into this house and put our beds and cupboards in there and we’d have a little eski full of ice and stuff like that and kept it all nice and tidy. We’d sweep it out all the time so there was no mud or anything in there.

For Dave, having escaped his father’s sexual abuse at home, the chance to reestablish a safe home environment with mates seemed important, and he recounted the story of reconstructing and maintaining the squat with animated pride. More generally, it was as though the intensity of young people’s various experiences of alienation from place drove a similarly intense struggle to “seek out” and regain “thick places,” in whatever ways they could (Casey 2001, 408). As Casey (2001, 408) argues, “The more places are thinned-out, the more, not the less, may selves be led to seek out thick places in which their own personal enrichment can flourish.” Indeed, not only were young people able to identify found places “instrumental” (Moore 2000, 143) to their physical survival of homelessness, but they were also able to identify “spacefull” place, as Samantha described it, important to existential well-being. “Spacefull” place Some young people talked of having special places in which they could “let go,” places in which the often tiring, defensive vigilance of street survival could be set aside. Interestingly, young people specifically described a different atmosphere and a particular kind of peace in these places. Spacefull places—in parklands, near water—were those uncrowded, undesignated places that provided physical and emotional room for reflection, for dreaming. Taken for granted by the homed and existing outside the defined place of drop-ins and refuges, spacefull places were alternative safe places of quiet that allowed for unaccounted time—for

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resting, recuperation, for the simple enjoyment of place itself. As Nell argued, spacefull places were places that took away “the depression of being homeless,” and for Sue, Peter, Jamie, and Samantha, spacefull places enabled time in which to “just think”: c at h er i n e: So what’s good about the botanical gardens? su e: It’s peaceful, it’s so nice there. c at h er i n e: Can you try and explain a bit more about why you like it? su e: Um, it’s not crowded, it’s not packed, I can’t stand crowds . . . I get claustrophobic around a lot of people . . . c at h er i n e: So would you go there very often? su e: As much as I can . . . I went there about four times this week. c at h er i n e: What do you do or think about while you’re there? su e: Um, I think about my problems . . . Just think about your problems and see how you can sort them out. Sit there and read a book . . . c at h er i n e: Do you think it is important to have places like that? su e: Yes. c at h er i n e: Why is that place important do you think? su e: I dunno, I love it. I just go there, think and see how you can sort ’em out better. pe t er: Yeah, down at the wharf, I go sit down there by myself, just watch, looking out, just thinking about shit, what I want to achieve in life and shit like that . . . I just like to sit down quiet. ja mi e: When I’ve got some money I normally spend nearly all day on the ferries. Go across to Manly, Parramatta, Watson’s Bay, place like that. I just like the water. When I’m on the boats I just forget about everything. c at h er i n e: Why do you reckon that happens? ja mi e: I dunno . . . It’s just since I’ve been a kid, like every time I get on a boat, I forget about everything. c at h er i n e: Is that a good thing? ja mi e: Yeah, it’s good actually. It’s cleansing. Cleansing my soul for some reason. sa m a n t h a: The park . . . we sit up there and listen to our little portable radio that runs by batteries.

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c at h er i n e: Why do you go up there? sa m a n t h a: Spacefull. Peaceful .  .  . It gives me time to think about things . . . c at h er i n e: Is it a special place for you? sa m a n t h a: Yeah. c at h er i n e: Why is it special? sa m a n t h a: Well, when me and my Dad first got back in contact which was after . . . ten years . . . He met me at that park and that’s . . . you know . . . just saves me the memory of that day . . . what it was like and stuff like that . . .

It seemed that what made place spacefull was its therapeutic value, a value of place that Kearns and Smith (1993, 267) identify as central to home. Within the placeless and hollowed-out landscape of homelessness, then, young people stitched together not just shelter but a fragile geography of home by drawing together instrumental found spaces as well as “peaceful,” “spacefull,” “cleansing” places in which the ever-pressing needs of daily survival could be temporarily met, in which they could dwell, in which they felt connected to themselves and to others, and in which they could allow their past to emerge and dare to imagine their future. The timelessness and placelessness of homelessness could be countered through the identification of “nurturing places” (Fullilove 1996, 1517) with which longer-term and also “timefull” engagement could be developed. In such places, selves and bodies could be subject to a process of reflexive reconstitution and even healing. Ultimately, however, given the transient and hectic lifestyles led by young homeless people, access to such timefull and spacefull place could never be controlled or guaranteed. Relationships to place established during periods of geographical stability were quickly dissolved as young people changed refuges, made new friends, and were moved on from squats, or when other issues emerged, such as owing money, becoming physically or mentally unwell, or experiencing violence. Although young people could take hold in place, this was a fragile embedding easily shattered in the broader context of vulnerability and chaos associated with homelessness.

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In this spatial context of toxicity, young people could also choose to protect themselves from reexperiencing the trauma of displacement by only pursuing vagrant engagements with place. And yet, if “places are locations where personhood can happen and flourish,” young people’s vagrancy not only undermined physical safety and survival but also cyclically perpetuated their existential and psychological “disenfranchisement” (Murphy 1999, 60). The lack of alternative places of care that might intervene in geographies of grief, chaos, and vulnerability not only forced young people’s occupation of vagrant place but entrenched vagrancy as a distracting coping mechanism, as Sam discussed: c at h er i n e: So you said you left home when you were eleven. That’s very young isn’t it? sa m: That’s ’cause my dad passed away and I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I just took off and my older brother was on the streets at that time, so I came to where he was which was here in the city and the Valley and stuff. I’ve never dealt with my dad dying and I think that’s why, and I’ve lost my two sisters as well, I’ve got a tattoo of them on my arm. I think that’s why I’m still on the street and I can’t get myself together, because I’ve never actually dealt with bad things that have happened in my life. I’ve just turned to drugs and alcohol and the streets.

That positive relationships to nurturing place are “essential” (Fullilove 1996, 1517) to young homeless people’s practical survival and emotional well-being needs urgent consideration in a context in which the hardening of public space and even of designated support services against the crucial felt-experience of place embeddedness and sanctuary marks contemporary Western responses to homelessness. In their identification of found and spacefull place, thrown into relief is young people’s resilient yet damaging quest not just for shelter but for “placefulness” (Murphy 1999, 57), for meaningful place that gave rise to feelings of rootedness, expansiveness, and affirmation. Young people demonstrated their need for places in which it was possible to sleep and store belongings but also to maintain connection with friends and family, to confront “problems” and “bad things,” to just think and be.

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While the profound affective and existential impacts of geographical dislocation remain inadmissible evidence of homelessness, however, the place needs of the most precariously placed, of the “homesick” (Gesler 1992, 738), continue to be underimagined, and vagrancy continues to be instituted as the hard-line response to placelessness. Those most in need of place as a resource for identity building, belonging, and psychological well-being are abandoned to anomic place, to those toxic places of abuse, to those places of marginality, impermanence, and anxiety that only further erode the self and waste the body. It is stunning that within full daylight, within reach of shelter, rescuers, phones, and transport, the most profoundly performed moments of “place-panic” (Casey 1993, ix) consistently unfold. Call the search and rescue teams. Set off the satellite beacon that will bring the chopper with space blankets and hot tea. Call the police. Call the state emergency service. Gather the volunteers. There is a boy who is injured, he has no shelter, he is without food, he is lost. The dumb silence booms complicity: a boy lost in the bush captures a nation’s hope, a boy lost in the city and suburbs captures only disdain, if his struggle to return home is registered at all.

4 Outside Community We’re just totally different human beings really, fuck . . . —Josie

As Josie so blu n t ly su mma r i z ed, the lack of access to spacefull and timefull place indelibly marked young homeless people as alien. Feeling “abnormal,” estranged, unable to dwell in place and time in the often doubled contexts of trauma and transience, young people routinely experienced social displacement. Their embeddedness in family, neighborhood, and community was splintered by painful body and place memory, and they were caught out in every way, with reading, with knowledge of basic food groups, with forms of formal interaction and communication. They struggled with health, self-presentation, and hygiene; they wore the clothes discarded by the fashionable. Their days did not revolve around expected forms of education, work, or recreation but around street networks and black market survival. As “just totally different human beings,” young people suffered social disjuncture in intimate, embodied detail. Bourdieu usefully addresses such bodily disqualifications from social place, making clear the links between spatial and social displacement and between social and personal discourses of abnormality (see also Stephenson 2006, 168). Homelessness, as a process of dramatic separation from the key sites that inform the occupation of a recognized social position, represents for Bourdieu (1999b, 124) the extreme of social exclusion. As Bourdieu (2000, 222) argues, to exist outside of the sites, particularly of 105

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the home and of employment, that ensure the development and maintenance of socially recognized ways of being in the world, of social “function,” is to risk “social death” (Stephenson 2006, 167), to risk exclusion from humanity itself—an exclusion Josie confirmed. For Bourdieu (2000, 241), “There is no worse dispossession, no worse privation, perhaps, than that of the losers in the symbolic struggle for recognition, for access to a socially recognised social being, in a word, to humanity.” Without the sociocultural dispositions that enable investment in the “game of life,” the displaced remain “excluded from the game, dispossessed of the vital illusion of having a function or mission, of having to be or do something” (ibid., 222). For as Bourdieu explains, it is through inhabiting particular geographic places, which are at once social and cultural places, that the subject learns habitual ways of being and is disposed in ways appropriately matched to his or her social context. Through being in place and thus subject to sociocultural habitus and generative bodily schema, the subject develops “bodily knowledge” (ibid., 128), a range of bodily skills, postures, behaviors, and competencies that enable practical incorporation into social life. Through habitus, the subject experiences an adjusted bodily coincidence with his immediate social world: “He feels at home in the world because the world is also in him, in the form of habitus” (ibid., 143). For the displaced, however, for those forced to occupy “sites of social relegation,” for those suffering the “destiny effect from belonging to a stigmatised group” (Bourdieu 1999a, 64), for “people without a future” as Bourdieu (2000, 221) so confrontingly describes, the inability to claim valued corporeal, geographic and social space is felt and lived as a terrible “discordance” (ibid., 159). The inability to embody and mobilize a desirable habitus or set of normative social attributes condemns the destitute and dispossessed to feeling “‘out on a limb,’ displaced, out of place and ill at ease” (ibid., 157). The habitus of the destitute inculcates an acute awareness of the bodily and behavioral “mismatches” that prevent social participation and investment (ibid., 159, 212) and that result in “personal suffering” and “self-despair” (Bourdieu 1999a, 64). Josie, for example, very painfully described her complete identification with drugs: “They are me,” she said, “they are what I do . . . that’s

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what I am.” Heroin, Josie’s “game of life,” gave her something to do but offered neither a route to social recognition nor to personal happiness: I don’t feel I have a purpose . . . I don’t feel like I’ve got a purpose and that’s why I use heroin because I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t feel I’m good at doing anything else. Not that I’m good at being a heroin addict, but that’s all I know what to do with myself . . . It’s my way . . . what I do . . . You’re a social worker, I’m a heroin addict.

And indeed, Josie’s despair and self-loathing were such that she craved to be sent back to jail where, forced to be without heroin, she could “sleep just normally” and experience “not having to use drugs to sleep, not having to use drugs to be able to eat, not having to use drugs to be able to walk.” It was only in jail without heroin, Josie argued, that her sense of herself as a “normal” social being could begin to emerge. In jail, she said, “You realize a bit more about yourself, how you, what foods you like, what television shows you like, who you are a bit more . . . who loves you . . . who’s important to ya.” And in jail, you were finally safe from police arrest. In the context of living transiently in the most socially marginalized of spaces—outside of even stigmatized institutional spaces—homeless young people often remained disoriented and alienated from basic forms of socialization and from basic opportunities for self- and identitydevelopment. Further, given that the homesite of socialization, so crucial for Bourdieu, had for many been an original site of neglect, abandonment, and sexual and physical torture and trauma, as discussed in chapter 2, young homeless people not only struggled to perform basic life skills (such as cooking, cleaning, budgeting) and socially expected bodily and behavioral orientations but also carried alternative habitual dispositions of fear, shame, defensiveness, anger, and mistrust into an already fragile future. Neither rooted in body nor place, their inclusion in normative networks of family, neighborhood, and community eroded. Living fragmented on the margins of social and geographic space, young homeless people faced the future armed only with a “dysfunctional” (Bourdieu 2000, 161) habitus that in turn further reinforced alienation, “stigmatisation,” and “status loss” (Roschelle and Kaufman 2004, 26). As Roschelle

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and Kaufman (ibid., 25) stress, homeless people may simply “not have the means to engage in successful social interactions.” Or, as Bourdieu (1999b, 129) puts it, they may not “have all the cards necessary to participate in the various social games.” Such powerlessness makes the future “a game of chance” rather than a purposeful game of opportunity, expectation, and anticipation (Bourdieu 2000, 221), particularly for those who experience the increasing erosion of social and cultural capital in the context of longer-term homelessness. According to Bourdieu (ibid., 223), with the correlated erosion of social and physical place and “the disappearance of any coherent vision of the future” come a range of desperate measures to “reject fatalistic submission” to life paths made seemingly worthless and meaningless by sociospatial exclusion. Theft, violence, extreme and risk-taking behaviors, gambling, and “making something happen rather than nothing” can all be understood, Bourdieu (ibid., 223) suggests, as “a desperate way of existing in the eyes of others, of achieving a recognised form of social existence” in a context in which access to normative social resources is limited. Such activities, and in particular drug and alcohol use as Josie’s interview made clear, certainly strongly oriented and gave structure to many young homeless people’s daily activities. Further, young homeless people’s demand for recognition could also be seen reflected in the craving for any social drama that might break up the monotony of the day and in the often risky strategies of “verbal denigration and physical and sexual posturing” that Roschelle and Kaufman (2004, 31) likewise find mark young homeless people’s command on social status. Needing critical attention here is not just the cycle of damage suffered in “the search for recognition” (Bourdieu 2000, 166) by the socially displaced but the profound and disabling felt-experience of anxiety about the “legitimacy” of their existence that the displaced must endure (Bourdieu 2000, 237). “Subproletarians” are outside the game of life (ibid., 221), are without illusio, are without “the game under the skin” (Bourdieu 1998, 80) in the form of a socially and economically desirable habitus. Like K. in Kafka’s The Trial as Bourdieu (2000, 237) argues (and as discussed in chapter 3), the dispossessed are forced to occupy not only alienated space but also “alienated time”:

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Dispossessed of the power to give sense, in both senses, to his life, to state the meaning and direction of his existence, he is condemned to live in a time orientated by others, an alienated time. This is, very exactly, the fate of all the dominated, who are obliged to wait for everything to come from others, from the holders of power over the game and over the objective and subjective prospect of gain that it can offer.

Alienated in space and time, the displaced are denied what the placed take for granted—“social importance,” “recognition, consideration, in other words, quite simply, reasons for being” (ibid., 240–41). The displaced, and in particular the homeless as those who live the “furthest from a ‘normal existence,’” must suffer their social “excommunication” in discordance and in degraded place (Bourdieu 1999b, 129), although the placed, and in particular the elite, move in habitual “concordance” (Bourdieu, 2000, 160), rich in social and symbolic capital and righteous in their claim on the public sphere. Dispossessed spatially and economically and dispersed into temporal margins, the displaced, the “discredited” (Goffman 1963, 4), must survive outside the comforts of both material and social belongings. Feeling “Abnormal” For the young homeless people who took part in my research, the feeling of being outside community resulted from an incapacity to gather resources to establish and maintain an independent home and from the unique, traumatic, and damaging life paths associated with becoming and living homeless. As I will go on to illustrate further in this chapter, in homelessness, young people’s displacement was not just from housing and family care, but from school, work, and neighborhood, and more generally, from a sense of “normal” sociality and bodily competency. Living homeless, young people felt “abnormal” and stigmatized because often they had never experienced and continued to be excluded from what they considered a “normal” home and family life. As illustrated in chapter 2, many young people had experienced unhappiness, conflict, neglect, abandonment, and sexual and physical abuse in their family homes. Once homeless, young people could not make life plans due to their highly transient lifestyle, and they struggled to hold on to

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friendships and support networks as well as their possessions. They suffered from mental illness and low self-esteem, faced a range of legal issues, and accumulated further experiences of trauma. All these factors gave specific shape to young homeless people’s bodies and behaviors and contributed to their felt-experience of social discordance, of feeling different and inferior to other “normal” people. As well as having to deal with the range of issues that made it untenable to live in their family home, once homeless, young people faced an important transitionary period in life usually without stable interpersonal, institutional, or economic support. Initially, however, they simply had to try to cope with the emotional trauma and survival challenges of no longer having access to the resources, including shelter, of their family home. Peter, for example, who could no longer live at home due to an extremely complex history of family breakdown, life-threatening physical abuse, and his own troubled behavior, discussed sleeping outside on the front steps of his own family’s home and having to break in to his home to get food while homeless: My mum kicked me out and I refused to go to youth care, and my dad was the one who finished work at 11 p.m. and I’d be sleeping on the front steps and me bag was my pillow. Just sleeping there like that and she wouldn’t let me get a glass of water or a cup of water so I could brush my teeth in the morning or rinse my mouth out with water. Had to sometimes break into the house to get food when they were gone out. Get a packet of two-minute noodles or something like that, and make a sandwich real quick ’cause I was so hungry.

For Max, life without housing was also lived as a struggle to meet basic physical needs: Like when I was on the streets, like . . . how bad it was just being cold all the time. Cold and hungry and thirsty or maybe going to the toilet, there was nothing you could do about it . . . Even if you need to go to the toilet, it’s like a struggle . . . You have to walk to the closest train station . . . Having a drink of water, it’s a struggle. You have to walk around blocks and blocks before you find somewhere with a tap with a handle on it.

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The extremely distressing experiences of displacement from home and housing underpinned much broader experiences of social displacement and corporeal discordance. Not only did young people have to face the difficulties of living outside the family home with few practical resources of their own, but many confronted the ordinary challenges of growing up, needing support, and trying to work out daily, life, and career paths without guidance or care. In having to focus on immediate survival and in being displaced from the mentoring bonds associated with family, friends, education, and employment, young homeless people had little positive orientation to the future. Kylie and Ange, for example, drew a differentiation between themselves and other people because of their inability to make plans for the day or for the future: a nge: It’s like people say, “Can you see yourself in ten years?” And I can’t see myself tomorrow. k y li e: ’Cause you never know what happens the next day. a nge: People have plans mate, but I don’t. I don’t plan my life. k y li e: I don’t plan my life . . . I just take it as it comes. c at h e r i n e: Why? a nge: There’s no point, ’cause every time I’ve made plans I’ve been crushed. k y li e: It doesn’t work. a nge: And I’m always the one that feels down and been hurt. So I figured out, why make plans when I can just take it step by step? I don’t want to get hurt again.

Peta also underlined the inertia entrenched through the forced focus on immediate needs: I mean, when you don’t have security, you can never move on can you? You’re always worried about whether you’re going to be living on the streets tomorrow rather than saying, ok, well, I might just go and do a TAFE [Technical and Further Education] course or something.

Young people’s struggle to retain or take up education and employment opportunities ensured their ongoing poverty and also constrained their opportunities to socialize with a range of peers. Because they were

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often stigmatized by others, young people were restricted to forming friendships with those “in a similar position” (Sterk-Elifson and Elifson 1992, 248), and their own acute awareness of their difference from others and their shame about being homeless became barriers to wider social participation. As Riley noted, “I kind of pretty much lost contact with all the friends I had when I was at me mum’s, at school and that,” and Peter, who had been sleeping on trains and squatting in abandoned buildings, described his embarrassment at being neither at school nor in the care of supportive parents: pe t er: I want to get back into playing cricket but I feel too embarrassed about it. c at h er i n e: Why is that? pe t er: I dunno .  .  . ’Cause so many of the people that you see playing cricket these days are still going to school. Their parents come and watch them on a Saturday morning play cricket and my parents just don’t live here and no one’s gonna come and watch me play cricket or nothin’ like that.

Peter also discussed avoiding people and feeling shame and distress at not being able to keep his body and clothes clean while squatting in an equipment shed at his local sport ground: I was dying to have a bed and a shower . . . I’d hate being around people ’cause I’d smell that bad. I’d take my shoes off and they’d pong. I had no clean clothes, no clean socks, nothing. I hated it. I used to sit there all day sometimes ’cause I didn’t want people to smell me and think bad of me. So I’d sit there by myself all day, so no one could smell me.

Likewise for Jamie, feeling as though he was negatively judged while living homelessness was depressing: c at h er i n e: What about when you were homeless, what was that like? ja mi e: It was depressing sometimes .  .  . because people would look down on you and that. c at h er i n e: Why do you think people look down on you?

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ja mi e: I don’t actually know . . . ‘Cause they don’t want to actually admit that there is people out there homeless.

Many young people quite explicitly framed their experiences of homelessness in opposition to what they understood as a “normal life.” Indeed, as Bourdieu (2000, 160) argues, the feeling of discordance, of being corporeally and socially out of place, arises when habitual “dispositions are out of line with the field and with the ‘collective expectations’ that are constitutive of its normality,” or in other words, when an individual cannot mobilize or inhabit appropriately normative modes of social being. Nell, for example, articulated her desire to be able to live “a normal life” both with her parents and as an independent adult with “2.4 kids and a car and house.” She determinedly claimed, “I don’t think of myself a fucken piece of shit because I’m a disadvantaged youth!” but also outlined the numerous disadvantages she had faced and described some of the difficulties of life lived without structure, guidance, and even love: I miss a normal life. I wish that I could live with my parents and have fucken 2.4 kids and a car and house and all that sort of shit, [the] cliché. Because I don’t get . . . I’ve missed out on a lot of things that people with a normal family would. Opportunities, um, sometimes love, opportunity to go to school. Sometimes when you’re young and homeless, you can’t supervise yourself properly. Like if you’re in a home, your parents might say, “No! You’re not allowed to use drugs!” If you’re homeless, fuck yeah, let’s get on heroin, let’s steal or do naughty things, fucken . . . it’s like you can do whatever you want . . .

For Josie and Andy, whose daily and life paths currently revolved entirely around sourcing and using heroin, the feeling of being isolated and outside the “normal” did not evaporate when eventually they did secure housing. In fact, being housed but unable to establish a “normal” home in itself further reinforced Josie and Andy’s sense of social alienation and “abnormality.” Despite having moved from jail to the streets, where Josie had been living for two years before moving into their current housing commission house, this house was not considered “a home,” just

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temporary accommodation—“just somewhere to lay your head”—that was isolating, full of conflict, and difficult to maintain: I don’t like it and there’s people that know we live there now and we owe ’em money and they just sort of run in whenever they want . . . Our outreach place is going to move us. Andy just told me ’cause they reckon the neighbors don’t like us, so we’re gonna get moved . . . but in about four months or so Andy is going to get his own housing commission bed-sitter so that’ll be good for us . . . That’ll be easier to maintain and we won’t have to worry about the neighbors . . . It’s because one of his sisters is staying there as well and we always get into huge arguments and everyone’s screaming . . . so no wonder the neighbors complain.

Not only were Josie and Andy disconnected from the actual house they lived in, but they were also estranged from neighbors and from what Josie perceived as the geographically isolated and service-poor outer western suburb of Sydney with which she felt little cultural identification: c at h er i n e: Do you like Lakemba? josi e: No . . . It’s a lot of families, a lot of wog families and that . . . They don’t even speak English for one, most of ’em out there . . . Not many people I can relate to . . . not many . . . There’s nothing there, no Centrelink [government welfare service center] or anything like that.

More generally, however, and as Nell likewise reinforced, both Josie and Andy stressed their feelings of estrangement from the everyday activities of “a normal life”: c at h er i n e: So what’s a normal life, what do you mean by that? a n dy: A normal life where you work and come home, you enjoy what you’ve got, you kick back, you watch your television, you watch shows, you sleep . . . josi e: Like you . . . work . . . a n dy: A normal life is someone that comes home, like works, come home, has plans, goes and does his goals, day by day work, on the weekend organizes . . . weekends are organized like parties or whatever you organize. Like that’s a normal life .  .  . having like your normal house

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utensils. You’ve got everything you need in your house, a car, go out for trips and that. That’s a normal life, that’s fun. josi e: Not where one hundred percent of your effort is for drugs, one hundred percent of it’s just for drugs. We’re just totally different human beings really, fuck . . . If someone knocks on me door and wants a cup of sugar I should be able to give them that, but I don’t have a cup of sugar ’cause I don’t go shopping . . . We don’t go grocery shopping or anything like that, we don’t go clothes shopping, we don’t go to the movies . . .

Ironically, having a known place of residence presented a possible risk to Josie and Andy because of their drug debts, but more importantly, the dysfunction of their household itself served to further entrench their own feelings of personal dysfunction and social displacement. Without cooking utensils, food, or other household possessions Josie and Andy could not make a home for themselves nor could they integrate alongside “normal” people who lived in drug- and conflict-free homes. As they both reinforced, as heroin users, as “totally different human beings,” they were unable to engage in many everyday activities from sleeping, to food shopping and eating, to making life plans, to spending extra money on excursions or clothes. Their inability to give a cup of sugar to neighbors, a traditionally symbolic gesture of communal recognition and exchange, symbolized instead their exclusion from the most basic social transactions that did not involve heroin. Josie also illustrated her feeling of being outside “normal” life in terms of not having any form of official identification (such as a driver’s license or proof of age card) and was not able to get herself “together” enough to get one. Without identification, Josie could not register for the methadone program that she wanted, but as Andy and other young people pointed out, carrying identification when wanted for court attendance or other legal matters was not an option. Further, when all her time was taken up making money for heroin (by shoplifting, begging, and scamming), with the constant threat of not scoring and becoming dreadfully ill, there never was time for chasing up identification or registering for the methadone program:

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I’d like to go get on the methadone program and I’d like to run around with ID [identification] but I can’t . . . I’m not leaving myself stranded, I’m not going to be leaving myself sick where I can’t even walk.

Both Josie and Andy again used a particular symbol—an imaginary handbag—in order to contrast their lives—“people like us”—with the lives of others—“people who are set up.” Like the cup of sugar, the handbag became a powerful signifier of the experience of social emplacement and empowerment from which Josie and Andy felt excluded: a n dy: When you’re on the run and that, you don’t carry ID. josi e: It’s for people who are set up you know .  .  . People like us, we don’t have, we don’t have a handbag with us, or my ID and everything, and there’s a packet of tissues and there’s fucking contact numbers . . . a n dy: . . . and lollies and that . . . josi e: . . . I don’t, I’m not, organized like that. I’m the most unorganized, I am the most unrelying [unreliable] sort of person. You can’t rely on me at all.

Not having possessions was seen by many homeless young people as central to their disqualification from a “normal life.” Whether small—tissues, lollies, a handbag, clothing and cooking utensils—or large—a car, furniture, and a house—in the context of homelessness all possessions seemed equally impossible to hold on to if they could be acquired in the first place. Young people’s belongings were as transient as young people were themselves. They were left at different friends’ houses, were gradually eroded in moves from crisis service to crisis service, were swapped, sold, or placed in “hock” (the goods being sold but held for the person to buy back at a higher rate) and more often than not, were stolen or simply destroyed by others. Although securing the basics of food, water, and blankets could be a problem especially when rough sleeping, not being able to store personal belongings seemed to further reinforce young people’s sense of impermanence and insecurity: josi e: . . . That’s a big problem as well. Being on the street and going from place to place—you’ve got nowhere to keep your stuff . . . You can’t be carrying huge bags around everyday, so you just end up leaving them

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at people’s houses and you never get to pick them up. I’ve got one sock on today . . . c at h er i n e: So where do you keep your stuff? c h r is: I don’t have any stuff. I lost it all when I moved to Sydney. I had an apartment, I had a refrigerator, all the furniture. I ordered furniture when I got here and paid for the furniture and basically I lost all that. I got evicted. I moved into another apartment and the person I was living with threw me out. r ic h a rd: I was in detoxes and around here and everywhere, just doing the whole scene, just kept going around squats, stuff like that. c at h er i n e: So what was living in squats like? r ic h a rd: Sucks, really sucks. Basically you can’t have anything good there and you have to be careful with who you let know where you’re staying and that, ’cause if you stuff round one person, they could come and roll [rob] you, belt you. Plus the police always come in and closing down where you live and stuff like that and making you leave. So it’s not that good, it really sucks. c at h er i n e: In an ideal situation or in the future, what would home be? r ic h a rd: Just having your own place where I don’t have to worry about anyone, and they won’t take it away from me I s’pose. And just having actually possessions and you know, possessions and stuff like.

For other young people it was being diagnosed with a mental illness that was central in their narratives of feeling “abnormal.” Being ill made them feel alienated because of their unusual behaviors at times, such as hoarding, being disorganized and messy, avoiding contact with others, or sleeping and eating at random times throughout the day and night. Peta described her stressful, “paranoid” awareness of her difference to others: I think having a mental problem, you can’t live with anybody. You’re paranoid all the time because you’re just not, it’s sort of like you’re an alien and you have a different set of behaviors and you have a different set of normality appropriateness, where other people are just like “this is crazy” . . . You just don’t notice what other people notice and so you’re

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paranoid because you’re thinking, “Am I doing something that’s not as normal as them?” I’ve been told, “Why don’t you just do things like normal people?”

Young people with mental illness also felt alienated because of their valid fears of being judged negatively due to their illness and related selfharm and drug and alcohol issues. Some young people discussed trying to dress up to disguise themselves as “normal people” for real estate agents, wearing long-sleeved shirts to cover cuts or wounds from needle use. Others told the truth about their illness and homelessness and, as Sam described, consequently had job and rental applications rejected: sa m: I used to work in a steel factory down in Melbourne. There’s one up here, they’re exactly the same company, it’s an Australia-wide company. I applied for a job with them. Where it says “my address” on the form, I put “no fixed address at the moment” and they’ve knocked me back because I have nowhere to live. sa m: Because I’m truthful about it [having chronic depression], because I’m not ashamed of it because it’s not my fault that I’ve got that problem and now on real estate applications and stuff they ask you questions like that and I’m truthful with that, that doesn’t help me get a place. There’s been boarding houses that won’t accept me because of that . . . It does affect where you can stay and where you can’t.

Young people also expressed their general perceptions of the lack of acceptance of their illness and homelessness within the mental health and broader communities. Some discussed their specific stigmatization by mental health professionals because they suffered personality disorders, seen within the mental health sector, as Peta argued, as the “leprosy of all psychiatric disorders”: pe ta: Because you’ve actually got a, it’s a long-term psychological thing where you can’t just, no medication can ever, you need to basically have extensive counseling which professionals don’t exactly want to put a lot of hard effort in because they don’t believe it’s worthy of that.

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ja n i n e: ’Cause my diagnosis is . . . borderline personality right, doctors kind of go well you’re a fucking pain in the arse . . . piss off, it’s all your own fault, your life’s a mess because you did it . . .

Peta and Sam also discussed the ways in which they thought people either wanted those with mental illness to change or to be separated from the “normal” community, and Helen and Byron discussed the general correlation by some of mental illness, homelessness, and being a “fucking loser”: pe ta: I think there’s a thing in society where people have to, people with mental illness need to be more normal like us, you need to change to therefore not be alienated anymore. sa m: You go to a mental health place and it’s basically, the way I feel is that they want to separate myself from the rest of the community. h e len: I’m reluctant to tell anyone that I’m on a disability support pension ’cause I’m frightened, I don’t want to tell them that, I don’t want them to look down on me, think I’m worthless, think I’m a hopeless bludger. by ron: And some people just don’t give a fuck about you anyway. Like you walk down the street: “Can I please have a spare two dollars?” They turn around and say, “You fucking loser.”

An important part of young homeless people’s survival of social estrangement was their identification of communities more tolerant of homelessness, including the homeless community itself. Though young homeless people felt stigmatized, isolated, trapped, impermanent, and alien in their exclusion from multiple aspects of social life, including family and friends, recreational activities, housing, education, employment, and mental health care, they continued to struggle for experiences of tolerance, acceptance, comfort, and even belonging on the margins of social life. In Search of Community “Alienation from the world,” and exclusion from “an ordinary life, like having a home to go to,” as Peta and Jake described, made knowledge of alternative places of acceptance and care critically important in young

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homeless people’s daily and life paths. Although it was clear that young people felt deeply distressed about their multiple displacements from “a normal life,” they also strategically identified places in which they could access needed resources and feel “a community sense,” as Nell explained. Drop-in and supported accommodation services were important sites for interacting with safe adults and with peers, for receiving validation of experiences and needs, and for accessing resources that enabled greater social mobility. Young people also identified each other and the wider homeless community as important sources of companionship and practical and emotional support and as critical in their development of feelings of self-worth and security, perhaps for the first time. Finally, young people discovered that particular metro and regional areas or communities were more accepting and tolerant of their homelessness and thus were places in which they felt safer and could “fit in.” Through all of these resources, despite their homelessness young people experienced invaluable senses of protection, belonging, and inclusion and thus were both able to better survive homelessness and continue their fragile struggle for independence. In lieu of home and school and despite the regulated and time-limited nature of their support, drop-in and accommodation services provided many young homeless people’s basic bridge across the transitional gap between childhood and adulthood. Through their participation in services, young people were supported to address education and work-skill gaps, to develop life and parenting skills, to manage drug and alcohol use, to understand personal health and hygiene issues, to receive treatment for mental illness, and to access government assistance, among many other things. Services supported young people in their search for short- and long-term housing and in their applications for admission to drug and alcohol detoxification and rehabilitation centers, and were sometimes able to provide recreational and self-esteem-building activities, such as beach games, rock climbing, or creative writing, which young people would otherwise not have an opportunity to participate in. Perhaps most important, through their engagement in support services young people experienced understanding and validation of the range of issues and disadvantages they faced, often for the first time. Such

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recognition was critical in enabling young people to more clearly identify and address their own experiences and feelings: pe ta: I guess I found being validated is the biggest thing. Rehab was the start of it ’cause they, it was ok to complain there, where it’s not when you come from a middle class family [where] having problems is so foreign . . . I found that in rehab it was the first time I actually [realized] that I was treated wrong, I was treated bad and it wasn’t me [my fault] . . . I found that these people were saying that you did what you did at the time because it was the only thing you knew. And that’s what I’d never heard before, because I was always blamed. It was always my problem. If you got hit, then that’s your problem, you asked for it sorta thing.

Peta described the ways in which the different expectations within services enabled her to feel more positive about what she was achieving in life: I found like when I had nothing to prove . . . I moved further than I’ve ever moved before .  .  . It’s very comfortable, it’s sort of like a comfort zone. You don’t feel the alienation because it’s acceptable. It’s sort of, they can walk into your house, like for instance, a hoarding problem . . . Without being aware of mental illness they’d say, “This is unacceptable, you can’t live like this.” Whereas [the medium-term accommodation support workers] are telling me, “You’re better than most clients.”

Services also helped young people to develop the very basic, everyday practical skills needed in their move toward independence, including cooking, banking, cleaning, doing laundry, filling in forms, using the telephone and Internet, making weekly budgets, and driving. As Sue explained: When I entered [a medium-term supported housing facility], I entered a program, it’s an independent program. I do everything myself, just so I can get independence, so when I get my own place I know what to do. Living skills.

Importantly, within services many young people experienced comfort and care and also senses of family and community facilitated by bonds with other young clients as well as with staff:

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c at h er i n e: Do you feel at home here [youth crisis refuge]? al a sta i r: Yeah, it’s cool. It’s a pretty cruisy place. c at h er i n e: What do you think it might be about this place that, you know, makes you feel ok about being here? al a sta i r: Oh it’s just good. It’s just a good sort of community thing here. I know everyone here and that and I get along with most of the people here . . . It’s comfortable, sort of thing. ja m es: Now this [drop-in service] is like my second home. I come every day. I see my friends every day . . . I just feel comfortable here . . . if I didn’t feel comfortable, I wouldn’t be here. k y li e: But in other ways it’s [youth crisis refuge] good, because you’ve got people who really care for you. They’re like, the workers are like your mum and dad basically I reckon. That’s what I see it as. ’Cause they’re the ones taking care of you ’cause you’re in a refuge. It’s your family. a ngi e: All the family I’ve got at the moment is Kylie . . . That’s how I look at it. Closest thing. k y li e: ’Cause I’ve known her for a long time you know, I classify her as family. We’re living together now, and like the workers are there to help us.

For many young people it was not so much specific services or programs that provided guidance, community, or family, but the “service scene” more generally that generated familiar and supportive sociospatial networks. Young people could move between services and know many of the staff and other clients, and both accommodation and drop-in services were extremely important sites at which to meet up with friends or make new ones (see also Sterk-Elifson and Elifson 1992, 242). Though over time young people moved in and out of the range of refuges and used different drop-in centers, the scene itself remained a constant point of return in young people’s lives. Young people did sometimes build lasting relationships with service staff, and staff often remained mentors for young people long after they had left a service and gone on to establish independent living arrangements for themselves. It was not unusual for past clients now living independently to visit services, perhaps bringing their families, for example, to meet staff.

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For others, it was the homeless or street community in itself that provided support, care and a sense of family. As Downing-Orr (1996, 160; see also Hatty 1997) likewise reports in her research on young people homeless in London and Sydney, homeless communities often provided a more nurturing environment for young people than many had experienced while living in family homes: While there was evidence to suggest that the family home was often dysfunctional and dangerous and that the homeless lifestyle was also unsafe, these young people felt better cared for in the community. Therefore, these young people were not choosing homelessness per se, but were opting for a more welcoming and supportive environment.

Young people indeed discussed their street families that provided care and protection and to which, like the service scene, young people could continue to return for help and company. Geoff, for example, who had been physically abused and abandoned, discussed being looked after instead by his street parents, and Jamie (who also had escaped intense physical abuse) likewise emphasized the generosity, safety, and support offered within the community of “all us street people”: geof f: I didn’t know many people at first, but now I know quite a few people. At Martin Place I’ve got a fam . . . They’re like my mum and dad or they act like my mum and dad, and they help me out a lot and shit like. Their names are Bec and Paul and they’re like my mum and dad, so it’s all right, they look after me all the time and stuff, make sure I’m not getting harassed or bashed or something. c at h er i n e: Do you get scared? ja mi e: There’s that many of us down there [Central Station] there’s no reason to be scared . . . Everyone looks after each other. Like if you’re new, and you’re walking down there, they go “just jump in here! Jump underneath the blanket, get warm, go to sleep.” We’re like one big family all us street people. One person hasn’t got any money and they want a coffee, no worries, someone’ll buy ’em a coffee or a cup of tea or something.

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Nell pieced together a network of friends and street family in various states of Australia, and she moved in a constant cycle between specific sites of support, hitching rides with long-haul truck drivers to cover the distances up and down the eastern Australian coast. As well as benefiting from the care of her own street family, as an experienced “streetie” herself, she also made it clear that she felt a strong responsibility to care for others, especially those homeless for the first time (see also Downing-Orr 1996, 113). For Nell, this responsibility included knowing about the separate refuge system for homeless adults as well as where to find food and blankets. Nell also expressed an important sense of pride in the value of her street knowledge, competency, and seniority (see also Roschelle and Kaufman 2004, 33), discussing, for example, her upcoming “graduation” from a “street kid” to a “streetie” when she turned eighteen. As well as generating feelings of self-worth and providing a context of care and protection, the homeless community also offered Nell a strong sense of place connectedness in her long-term trajectory of transience. In particular, Nell experienced a sense of belonging in Brisbane, identifying the homeless inner-city community in Fortitude Valley as her street family. Although she was living rough, home “mightn’t be a house, but might be a community sense”: c at h er i n e: And before you said that you don’t come from “anywhere” . . . What do you mean? n e ll: My family sort of threw me around from one to the other my whole life .  .  . My parents got divorced when I was young and I sort of got thrown around from one family member to the other and then youth refuges and the streets and dah dah dah dah and I can’t say I’m from fuckin’ Brisbane or whatever ’cause I haven’t lived in one place my whole life. c at h er i n e: So if I asked you where you belonged what would you say? n e ll: In this universe or maybe Queensland . . . I feel most comfortable in Northern NSW or Brisbane, because you know how you have a street family? Well my street family is basically in the Valley in Brisbane. It’s like everybody there .  .  . Ok, it’s like Fortitude Valley is like a rough area, there’s a lot of homeless people there, but it’s really cool and like

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everybody looks after everybody and when new people come we make sure they’ve got blankets and stuff like that and show them where to get food if they don’t have any food and introduce them to everybody and take them out and have fun with them. Just look after people. So like my street family is sort of in Brisbane and umm . . . Like I could say my home is the Valley ummm, it mightn’t be a house, but it might be a community sense . . . n ell: Like a lot of the time in Brisbane, I have a few older friends. Like my street family’s mainly in their twenties and in their thirties. They looked after me like their little daughter . . . Like I’ve been looked after by the older males. They haven’t tried to rape me or anything, they’ve just more looked after me and made sure I was ok and took me in.

As Downing-Orr (1996, 112) similarly found, the protection, affection, and empathy offered to young people within the homeless community, and particularly by their peers with often similarly traumatic and transient biographies, afforded young people a crucial sense of self-esteem and belonging (see also Winchester and Costello 1995, 343). Such compassionate care had often not been encountered in their family home, nor, as Downing-Orr (1996, 159) points out, within the range of institutional systems with which young people may also have had sustained contact, including the education, care, and criminal justice systems (see also Winchester and Costello 1995, 334). Though life homeless was peppered with violence and risk, because of the protection and friendships developed within the community, as Downing-Orr (1996, 125) also argues, it seemed young people were much less likely to experience physical and sexual violence on the streets than they were when trapped in abusive family homes. Further, if such violence was encountered while on the street, young people at least had immediately available empathetic and knowledgeable support from others (ibid., 125). As Nell argued, “People on the street develop a lot stronger relationships” in the risky context of street survival: When I’m by myself on the streets, that’s like really, really horrible. If I’m with a group of friends, then it’s a lot easier. It’s better if you’re with good friends. And people on the street develop a lot closer relationships

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because they go through so much. ’Cause you like eat together, you get your food and you eat, you live together, you look after yourself from gangs or drug dealers or fucken pedophiles chasing you or whatever’s going on. And you might sell drugs together, like I used to sell speed in Brisbane, and then you run away from the hierarchy drug dealers that are trying to get you. And like everyone looks after one another, so you develop pretty full on families . . .

As several young people noted, “a community sense” and sense of belonging could also often be experienced more generally within specific nonhomeless communities known to embrace alternative lifestyles and value difference. In these communities, young people’s difficulty in upholding social norms—“the standard fucken, you go to school until you’re eighteen, you save up your fucken money, you have a job, you work in the office and all this sort of shit”—drew less attention and young people felt more able to fit in with others. According to young people, such communities could be located within or outside major city centers. Nell, for example, named a particularly tolerant site or suburb within each of the major cities on the Australian east coast as well as specific smalltown communities that she also perceived as tolerant and accepting of homelessness: c at h er i n e: So are there places in all of your travels . . . are there places that you think allow you to be yourself? n e ll: Yes, for sure. There’s one area out of every fucken place. Like, like in Cairns there’s a special area, it’s like Soul Food Cafe. It’s a special vegetarian cafe that once or twice a week they have this big thing of bands. Everybody can get up and play instruments . . . Or Nimbin for example, the entire Nimbin community spirit. Lismore’s pretty good, there’s a big Gothic scene there. The Valley in Brisbane. It’s the same places that I like to hang out . . . Newtown in Sydney, fucken Melbourne, St Kilda’s pretty cool. c at h er i n e: What is it about those places? n ell: Very accepting, accepting that people can be street kids . . . Places that you can learn from people and you can be yourself, you can dress how you want to dress and umm, there might be special places like

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temples or some religious thing in the town, some spiritual sense to the town, sort of a different sort of life. Not the standard fucken, you go to school until you’re eighteen, you save up your fucken money, you have a job, you work in the office and all this sort of shit, you go to uni . . . A very different sort of lifestyle.

As it was for Nell, the most accepting area in Sydney for Crystal was Newtown, an inner-city suburb. This was a special area for Crystal because of its interesting history and its celebrated status as a community tolerant of sexual and social difference. In Newtown, Crystal felt as though she was an accepted part of the community and she felt safe there in comparison to the central city areas in which she claimed people were suspicious and alienated from each other and where she had once been physically assaulted near a major street and yet no one responded to her calls for aid. Newtown instead, was a “utopian society”: Newtown’s a very like .  .  . even though it’s another suburb of Sydney like anywhere else, it’s not like anywhere else in the sense it’s got more of a sense of community . . . If I had to sum up Newtown, that’s how I would, all walks of life, everyone from young to old. It doesn’t matter what you’re like or what your views are, you can speak ’em and not be afraid of being persecuted or . . . It’s sort of like a . . . utopian society, just within . . . I mean there are still bad things that happen there like anywhere else but not in the same um, . . . not as much and not as, it’s not as easily accepted. If you saw someone in trouble in Newtown you could go up and say “Are you all right?”

Nell also expressed similar sentiments in contrasting her experiences of being homeless in the “country” with being homeless in the city: In the country, like Nimbin, everybody’s more supportive and looks after you, like they might take you into their home. And my fiancé and I were in Nimbin and we were homeless and that and there people like looked after us and took us into their home because people are not as suspicious . . . People are less concerned than in the cities. Nobody’s really going to take you into their home unless they’re like full on Christians and like it’s a bit different because of that.

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For James, it was the Darlinghurst community in inner-city Sydney that offered him a powerful space of social and sexual acceptance, recognition, and belonging. Though he was now homeless, he was relieved to have left his small home town in rural Queensland: Since I moved to Sydney, the only nightclubs I’ve been to are gay and bi nightclubs where I feel more comfortable instead of walking in to some pub and someone says, “Oh, look, he’s gay, let’s smash him!” At least if I walk into a gay nightclub, they say, “Yeah, he’s gay, he’s one of us, leave him alone” . . . I belong down here. In my home town, just say if you’re gay, you’re out, get out of town, you don’t belong here. In Sydney if you’re gay, who gives a shit?

In a range of ways, then, young people were able to access resources to help address their feelings of displacement from mainstream social life and were able to identify specific places or communities in which they felt positively affirmed and in which they felt safer from violence. In response to felt-experiences of discordance, nonbelonging, social alienation, and stigmatization associated with homelessness, young people were able to construct a geography of social emplacement that included networks of services, street family, and tolerant communities and that drew them in together with others who faced similar disadvantages and exclusions in particular (see also Sterk-Elifson and Elifson 1992, 248). This geography of belonging played a critically important role in young people’s physical safety and health, in their mental and emotional survival of trauma and of the stress and isolation of homelessness. As Roschelle and Kaufman (2004) and Rowe and Wolch (1990) argue, however, the “personal avowals” (Roschelle and Kaufman 2004, 41) and the emotional and material support received from the homeless community, though critical to survival, do not necessarily help homeless people to counter the effects of their broader sociostructural disadvantage. Instead, reliance on the homeless community and on risky strategies to generate self-esteem was likely to further discredit young homeless people, according to Roschelle and Kaufman (2004, 41) and to reinforce homelessness as the only way of life possible (Rowe and Wolch 1990, 201). As Riley indeed argued:

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It’s just easier, so much easier just to chuck it all in and go back to [the street] once again, in like the circle. It’s hard to break out of the scene. You’ve got to make a whole new group of friends and I pretty much completely lost contact with all the friends I had when I was at me mum’s, at school, and that. Pretty much most of my mates are on the streets. So I guess it’s hard to get out of the scene, out of the rut really.

As noted in chapter 3, and as Downing-Orr (1996, 164–65) argues, although the “full on” engagement in the homeless community that Nell described, for example, provides an essential mechanism of emotional and practical support, it can also be expected to actually delay young people’s confrontation of the disadvantages they face: It became evident that the London and Sydney communities were potent forces, in which the majority felt safe and secure and to which they also felt “addicted.” In addition to the supportive structure, the community was attractive because it provided constant stimuli which would divert their attention from their own, unresolved, personal problems.

Echoing Riley’s comments above, Rowe and Wolch (1990, 201) suggest that although social networks help short-term survival, “long-term investments for improving the life path are postponed and resignation to a negative ‘self-as-homeless’ identity, deteriorating self-esteem and hopelessness are common and difficult to resist,” and as Hilary P. M. Winchester and Lauren N. Costello (1995, 343) similarly state, “The social networks of the homeless kids appear to encourage them into chronic homelessness rather than providing a means out into homed society.” Thus, many of the young homeless people who took part in my research seemed to be facing yet another twisted irony of living homeless. Although within predominantly homeless social networks young people may have experienced affection, security, and a sense of personal self-worth for the first time, these networks themselves potentially served to reinforce young people’s broader context of social displacement in the long term. Nonbelonging was a “rut” fed even by the belongings street communities afforded, and as such, sewn into young people’s precious experiences of connectedness were the swelling seeds of discord.

CONCLUSION

Remaking Homelessness Let the atrocious images haunt us. —Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“I won’t look w h i le I’m doi ng t h is,” she said, “as I’ll bias myself.” Her face became distant as she focused her seeing self through the hands that palpated my belly. What could she have seen anyway? There was yet opaque skin that I’d stared at often enough myself. I imagined the small boy who lay there and his wonder at the handprints moving across the domed ceiling above him. Here was another of those silent conversations between bodies—three of them. My body was a witness to a long discussion between my boy and the midwife. I willed myself to be patient. What did he say? What new things could she know of him, of me, that I didn’t know myself? I got the peculiar sense that I was eavesdropping, a sudden sense of my boy who talked to the midwife, my boy who even now, with his own tiny body encased in mine, moved in separate ways to me as he always would. I wondered in what ways the presence of this little spirit had changed my writing over the past six months. Revisiting the work on trauma in chapter 2 I had been particularly conscious of him pressing lightly into the desk edge. The boy would feel the fieldwork too, surely, feel my body both flinching from and moving out to meet with homeless others, feel again those other bodies moving through mine in the night, as I walked, as I wrote. Did he make me see the fieldwork and my own writing differently? 130

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What vision of homelessness felt and lived did my strangely doubled body now give rise to? I certainly found myself dwelling more on what would drive the sexual and physical assault of a child, on what could possibly enable such violent confusion of the body boundaries that vulnerability seemed only to make clearer and more defensible. I also wondered if an unborn child could feel homeless, or, unaware yet of what expanses lay on the outside, could only feel tied to place in a way it never would be again. And yet not every child was condemned to fight for the emplacement it lost in birth, only some, too many though, would again and again feel the tyranny of being cut free, of being loosened into a world where no other life-stays would emerge. Most centrally though, my pregnancy made more obvious to me what had been the case all along. It was exactly transactions of feeling between bodies that I was interested in. I was a midwife. I was trying to give felt articulation to other lives, palpating for the lived, setting aside temporarily the vision offered by science and medicine for a form of bodily communication, for a sense of the body felt and lived. Further, I was, perhaps most of all, midwife to my own body rather than to those of others. My writing, my boy brought home to me, was the struggle to surface all of those bodies whose corporeal inclusion in the process of research had changed my way of seeing and being in the world. Specifically, my writing was the struggle to give just and proper place to the emotional and corporeal experiences of those homeless people taking part in my research, to those somatic experiences that had haunted because they had not been let go, because full sense had not yet been made of them. In this book, my aim has been to make better sense of somatic experience—my own and others’—and to chart the process through which I have sought to remake homelessness as felt and lived. My aim has been to move from simply feeling to communicating feeling. I have moved from the gut feeling that my past projects were not done with to more concretely reflecting on such feeling as an analytical opening. I have also moved from an implicit engagement with homelessness felt and lived to finally more clearly name—via an exploration of displacement—some of the feelings at the core of homelessness and how these are negotiated, managed, and survived.

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I still, however, do not imagine this conclusion as the end point of such movements, and though the book may lay to rest in print a sense of homelessness I let gnaw at me too long, I find the work in this book to again mirror many of the gaps of homelessness research more broadly. Specifically, and before I turn to outlining the contributions I see my work here to also make, I would like to again make it clear that I feel keenly the lack of a closer engagement with the emotional and corporeal impacts of cumulative trauma in homeless people’s lives. This is an engagement that perhaps a multidisciplinary research team may be best placed to pursue. It is critical, nonetheless, that the sociologists, social scientists, and social geographers who undertake research on homelessness understand themselves as having a central responsibility to engage with trauma felt and lived. Trauma must be understood as a policy issue central to social exclusion, housing loss, and geographic drift, for example, as well as to crises in health and mental health. As I have also tried to make clear, unraveling the felt effects of trauma on participants and researchers is vital to the appropriate practical and ethical management of research projects in the area of homelessness. Homelessness researchers are well placed to explore the personal experiences of bodily (dis)connectedness that vicariously traumatic or more generally physically and emotionally challenging fieldwork throws into relief. Further, they are also well placed to explore the underresearched bodily challenges lived by others working with homeless people and by homeless people themselves. Being able to also reflexively theorize such experiences as well as engage with the epistemological and methodological assumptions, possibilities, and dangers of engagement with bodies and emotions, however, is essential not just to the rigor of any such work but to the extension of homelessness researchers and their research practices and findings into wider academic fields than they currently seem to occupy. Homelessness research predominantly develops as the terrain of government and nongovernment contracts, at great risk. Alongside their commitment to producing locationally specific applied research, homelessness researchers should not be obstructed—by grant conditions or what seem to be the moral imperatives of shaping immediate intervention—from

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bringing homelessness into arenas of contemporary social and cultural research as a vitally rich multidisciplinary issue that uniquely links theory, advocacy, and service delivery. There are many empirical and intellectual arenas to which research on homelessness connects, but without broader theoretical and methodological experimentation its influence remains contained. As a research issue for those in humanities and social sciences, homelessness—often claimed as a “welfare” or “policy” topic— ironically seems to offer little scope to explore issues central to contemporary theory, including the ethics, politics, and technologies of selfhood and emotional embodiment and the spatialities and temporalities of community, difference, and exclusion. It is precisely such issues and the researchers interested in them, however, that will be central in progressing debates about homelessness. It is also my experience that the various audiences of homelessness research—from homeless people to those engaged in service and policy delivery and in advocacy and research—greatly treasure new ways of conceptualizing dimensions of homelessness. The patronizing sense that the “applied world” needs protection from the difficulties or abstraction of “blue sky” research needs to be dropped quickly so that academic researchers can meet more effectively with other professionals in their field to learn about how to institute a mutually beneficial exchange of work practices, languages, and insights. That academics may need assistance with the policy translation of their ideas does not require the generation of research deemed to be more policy relevant but instead the generation of communicative avenues through which the intrinsic value of differing perspectives on homelessness might become better recognized. Of particular importance is how the exchange of differently invested professionals might offer surprisingly fruitful challenges to the kinds of ideas and research data assumed to be most appropriate and useful for inclusion in homelessness policy development. As I now discuss, a focus on the emotional and corporeal experiences that characterize life homeless, for example, has the potential not just to open new insights into how homelessness might be understood and responded to but to also suggest an ethical and political charge needed in both homelessness research and policy. Such a charge is issued, I argue, by the visibility of affect, by the

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recognition of homelessness as a form of suffering that is not obvious but in need of investigation. Precisely needed in the investigation of homeless suffering, as I have suggested here, are ways of encountering, theorizing, evidencing, and writing that can hold and communicate forms of affect in newly penetrative ways. It is time to bring the felt—as methodology and empirical terrain—to conceptual and practical interventions into homelessness. Inadmissible Evidence: Disembodiment, Dislocation, Discordance I have argued that in the context of homelessness, young people suffer a uniquely painful “somatography” (Casey 2001, 414) of displacement marked by disembodiment, dislocation and discordance. Their body geographies are shaped through repeated experiences of sexual and physical violence, through their dispersal in hollowed-out places, and through their estrangement from personal and public communities. They survive in toxic places and manage physical and mental injury and illness, alienated from the future, tortured by the past. Their bodies materialize a habitus informed by betrayal, transience, and degraded place. Their thinness, their sickness, their desolation and disorientation come to them through an enduring trajectory of placelessness. Given, as Casey (2001, 415) argues, that we are “subjects of place,” that we are subject to a process of “somatic localisation,” young homeless people’s suffering is ensured not only by their restricted access to places that protect, nurture, and enable but by their inhabitation of places of fear, charity, and transience and, in particular, their suspension in the nonplace of trauma. Inhering in the bodies of many young homeless people is a permanency of grief that sets them up for failure and humiliation, marks them for disdain and invisibility, and fragments their psychological and corporeal coherency. They remain primally displaced, timelessly caught in the reach of abusive homes that haunt the very neurobiological matter of the body. Although not all young homeless people experience the specific corporeal suffering of sexual and physical violence, an examination of felt homelessness also reveals the devastating somatic impacts of geographical

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and social displacement. The entrenched experience of estrangement from place and community becomes in itself a form of trauma that may compound existing experiences of abuse and at the very least destroys young people’s sense of self-worth and, of necessity, orients their life paths to short-term survival. They remain unsettled, unembraced by place. Their fragile well-being is eroded by rootlessness, and they are denied the affirmation and consolation of familiar place. Their vagrancy and bodily discordance alienate them from “a normal life.” They cannot gather the habitual or economic resources to avoid delegitimization, to avoid relegation to sociospatial margins. Not only are young people violated, neglected, and excluded but they are crushed by the sorrow, shame, and stigma that continue to well from the long-term and repeated hurt and trauma that homelessness entails. In sum, young homeless people are beside themselves, displaced by an interlocking context of corporeal, geographical and social suffering. They experience corporeal fragmentation, geographical detachment, and social alienation. And yet, despite the intensity of despair that marks even the resilient, creative habitations that young people carve out, homelessness as a form of suffering, as a felt-experience of trauma and rejection, can only be weakly traced in much academic and policy work on homelessness. The felt dimension of homelessness and how this is survived and lived barely registers, and yet homelessness draws together perhaps the most profound forms of physical, psychological, and emotional anguish that can be experienced. As it has so far proceeded, social scientific research on homelessness minimizes the expression of such anguish. It does not on the whole work to bear witness to the wounding that homeless people endure and instead focuses on the nature of structural disadvantage driving homelessness and on enumerating the scale of particular homeless populations. Health and medical research likewise gives powerfully important numeric representation to homeless people’s suffering, but the everyday context and impacts of this suffering are not well understood. In sum, discourses of causation and prevalence sidestep the felt and lived. The question of why homeless suffering remains inadmissible is one that points to the “glaringly obvious, yet intractable, silencing of emotion

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in both social research and public life” (Anderson and Smith 2001, 7). This is a silencing usefully linked to examinations of “how acknowledgement of pain, as a cultural process, is given or withheld” (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997b, xiii), which draw attention to the ways in which dominant representations or transformations of suffering may paradoxically obscure it. As Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (ibid., xxv) suggest, “Because of the manner in which knowledge and institutions are organized in the contemporary world as pragmatically oriented programs of welfare, health, social development, social justice, security, and so on, the phenomenon of suffering as an experiential domain of everyday social life has been splintered into measurable attributes.” In other words, Kleinman, Das, and Lock argue that because of the specialized and professionalized modes of knowing through which suffering is most often made visible, the felt and lived impact of suffering is made invisible and inadmissible. In particular, it has been noted that professional discourses of medicalization and econometrics have forced a peculiar reduction in the admissibility of pain. Indeed, it could be that the sequestering of homelessness as either the domain of medical research and health policy or the domain of social science research and housing policy has lead to the limited representation of and engagement with the hurt of homelessness. Stanley Cavell (1997, 94), for example, stresses “the absence of languages of pain in the social sciences,” and Kleinman and Kleinman (1997, 11) highlight the limits of measuring the burden of suffering according to indicators of disablement and health cost. Further, in its lack of response to the violence of pain, according to Cavell (1997, 94, emphasis added), “social science participates in the silence, and so it extends the violence it studies”; social science perpetuates the annihilation of “the one who suffers” (ibid., 97). The misrecognition of the felt dimension of homelessness in research and public policy perhaps also relates to the understandable urgency to intervene in homelessness, an urgency that inadvertently restrains the continued expansion and debate of definitions of homelessness. It is as though in-depth and theoretical exploration of the contradictory experiences constituting homelessness has been imagined to come at the cost of getting on with the “real” job of intervention. Querying and making

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complex the definition and representation of homelessness has been understood as extra to the more relevant, immediate project of informing policy and program development that require “metrics . . . to measure the burden of suffering in ‘objective’ terms that can enable the just allocation of resources to those most in need” (Kleinman and Kleinman 1997, 11). More generally then, whether or not homelessness is understood as a form of suffering and how this suffering is transformed into a problem site for intervention are crucial to shaping the eventuality, nature, and scope of research and public policy addressing homelessness. Given the serious, debilitating, and cyclically perpetuated trauma of homelessness outlined in chapters 2, 3, and 4 it might be asked how such sentient distress could not be foregrounded in responding to homelessness. In arguing that it is in fact backgrounded and made silent in defi nitions of and, therefore, responses to homelessness, I do not, however, want to infer that the dominant reduction of homelessness to terms relevant to professional health and welfare discourses and administrative needs is not also an important, necessary project. It is just instructive to remember that such professional investment in representations of social problems like homelessness is always present and reductive. As such, keeping the field of representation open to multiply different investments is essential in order to avoid the dominance of an “authorised construction of suffering for policy and programs” (Kleinman and Kleinman 1997, 15). It should be asked exactly what moral high-ground is occupied by policy-relevant research that utilizes the “highly ideological” language and measures of government bureaucracy (Bourdieu 1992, 236). Does such “scientific” research funded and prioritized by government in fact perpetuate a vision of homelessness that feeds the violent misrecognition of those who suffer? It is critical to think of what other “fugitive work in the social sciences and humanities” (Thrift 2004, 74–75), or indeed in other disciplines and professions, might usefully remake the suffering of homelessness as such, and in newly compelling terms. How might the perception that homelessness is only, predominantly, or rightly the domain of policy-oriented social scientific or health and medical research be undone? What other kinds of knowledge disciplines and modes of

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knowing can contribute to a “politics of affect” (ibid., 64) in the arena of homelessness? “What alternative forms of social inquiry” will allow the “emergence” of “dynamic, embodied understandings” (Shotter 2004, 444)? And with what possibly inventive effects surely needed in the current context of globally persistent homelessness? A Corporeography of Homelessness In this book, my aim has been to document alternative ways of coming to know and represent homelessness to those I most commonly encounter in research and in public policy. In working to make admissible the felt dimension of homelessness unmade by the imperatives of policy relevance, I have prioritized my reflexive, empathetic, and sensable bodily capacities. I have relied upon my own bodily skills to produce a somatic cartography of felt homelessness; I have felt my way across and into the emotional geography of displacement marking homelessness. That corporeography might offer unique exposure to the underresearched somatic landscapes of homelessness suggests an explosive terrain of investigation and methodological development. I do not, however, imagine corporeographic engagement with the felt dimensions of homelessness as pure or as an unproblematic process. Research engagement with the felt is ethically and practically fraught and does not offer the only, or the magical, truth about homeless suffering. Further, given that all kinds of representation are “compromised” (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997b, xiii), there is no easy turn to personal, emotional, embodied experience—either that of a witness or sufferer—to challenge fragmented medicalized, “mediatised” (Kleinman and Kleinman 1997, 1), and bureaucratized accounts of suffering. Not only will felt-experience always be problematically mediated in some way, but sentient suffering remains particularly resistant to meaningful representation. Sontag (2003, 126) grimly assesses that we “can’t understand, can’t imagine” others’ suffering and that “compassion is an unstable emotion” (ibid., 101). “The homeless can be felt too much,” Desjarlais (1997, 65) points out. Their suffering exceeds meaning and blunts compassion. And Karen Crinall (2006, 73) echoes: “Although many documentary images elicit emotional responses from privileged viewers, the visibility of homeless

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people as aestheticized objects does not necessarily translate into action to their advantage.” Likewise, Kim Hopper (2003, 205) is scathing about the “prepackaged compassion” of ethnographers of homelessness. “Serious acts of witnessing” (ibid., 211) borne of the “luxury of empathy” (Passaro 1996, 7) are not enough to intervene in suffering and, in the context of homelessness research and advocacy, threaten to dissolve into personal disaffection (Hopper 2003, 200) or into the “politics of compassion” that constitutes homeless people as pathologized victims only in need of services (Wagner 1993, 7; Wright 1997, 27). Such critiques assume that the work of bearing witness is either impossible or done or again, that it is somehow an adjunct or even obstacle to the work of “engagement” and “action” also called for (Hopper 2003, 205; Sontag 2003, 101). So what is the use of corporeographies of homelessness and the redescription of homelessness felt and lived that these might give rise to? What might be the use of remembering homelessness as a form of corporeal and emotional suffering, of reasserting that vulnerability is central to homelessness, of insisting that trauma, rootlessness, and alienation be retained and foregrounded rather than silenced and subsumed in definitions of homelessness? The recognition or reinscription of vulnerability, Butler (2004, 43) suggests, is vital for “sustaining vulnerability.” The very fact that “there is no guarantee” that the vulnerability of others will be recognized—as Sontag argues—only powerfully reinforces the importance of the struggle to broaden the norms that govern who will and who will not receive recognition (ibid.). For Butler (ibid,) “Vulnerability takes on another meaning at the moment it is recognized, and recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability.” It is only through its continued recognition that vulnerability is reconstituted and sustained as such. Critical to the possibility of recognition, Arthur Frank (1995, 198) argues, is precisely the opening of selves into each other that inscription by the felt can enable. When suffering “becomes an opening to others” (ibid., 176), when suffering is open to identification with and by others, it is remade and named as suffering for the first time. Suffering, when shared, engenders an active compassion in those who bear witness to it. In a context in which the felt is refused and understandings of homelessness

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remain “thinned out” (Kleinman and Kleinman 1997, 2) in research and policy, however, the powerful, transformative, affective call of suffering Frank and Butler trace out similarly risks effacement. Bearing witness to the felt therefore remains always critical to the sustained remaking of homelessness as an existential, corporeal vulnerability, as a form of suffering requiring a response. It is through somatically registering and then communicating the feeling of suffering, with which others can likewise identify, that suffering becomes an opening to others and can thus be understood, remade, and responded to. It is the potent reach of the felt that fires a corresponding somatic resonance in the bodies of others. It is as an affective force that suffering enters and makes witnesses of strangers. Encountered as a form of displacement felt and lived, for example, homelessness extends a more widely recognizable call to those who struggle to identify “homelessness” but who know in themselves the haunting shame of traumatic body memory, the grief of lost places, the fear of loneliness, and the panic of nonbelonging and exclusion. As displacement, as disembodiment, dislocation, and discordance, homelessness is already known to others. As a corporeal, geographical, social vulnerability it is familiar, it permeates, it can be shared, recognized and attended to. Being beside one’s self with grief in the face of others’ pain and vulnerability is to be “given over to the touch of the other” (Butler 2004, 32), is to participate in a radical recognition of the connectedness of human subjects. As Butler (ibid., 30) argues: “To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by that we develop a point of identification with suffering itself.” Being beside one’s self is a corporeographic engagement that cannot be unmade. As such, awareness of others’ suffering “can be a point of departure for a new understanding” (ibid., 30) and as already stated such new understanding can only usefully continue to reinvigorate the long-term struggle to respond effectively to homelessness. So first, the value of corporeography in the field of homelessness is the felt opening to vulnerability and suffering that it may enable (but not guarantee). The researcher’s grief—an inscriptive result of corporeal exposure to the pain of others—becomes both a site and tool for

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analysis and an impetus for understanding. Second, making homelessness “resound” (Nancy 2007, 6) as vulnerability and suffering—to which the thickest possible description of its felt dimension largely contributes— is central in issuing a more broadly resonant ethical call for compassion and action. The researcher’s grief becomes in turn a political tool. Remaking homelessness as felt challenges senselessness (Butler 2004, xviii) in the face of senseless suffering (Frank 1995, 176). Given that, as Kleinman and Kleinman (1997, 9) claim, the “cultural process of professional and political transformation is crucial to the way we come to appreciate human problems and to prepare policy responses,” the role of the compassionate witness who is transformed by, and transforms or makes sentient suffering known as such, becomes clear as pivotal rather than superfluous to action. That the felt dimension of homelessness is derealized by dominant modes of representation, that accounts of the felt impact of homelessness are incomplete and inadmissible, in fact makes bearing witness to the felt a continued urgent and necessary methodological, empirical, and political intervention. Third, flowing from the “affective bond” (Leder 1990, 163) that suffering can establish, remaking homelessness as felt, and in particular, as deeply, lastingly, traumatic, will also practically “prefigure” (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997b, xviii) the broad imagining of homelessness and the holistic and cautious ways in which any response to it must be negotiated. That young homeless people are grief stricken, for example, is itself as important a research, policy, and public issue as young people’s structurally disadvantaged access to independent accommodation, employment, and income. Indeed, recognition of the corporeal and emotional “landscape of precariousness” (Forrest 1999, 17) that young people must also negotiate and survive is central in a context in which programmatic responses to compounded exclusion—through the provision of housing and employment programs, for example—may leave trauma as both cause and impact of homelessness untouched. As Kay Anderson and Susan J. Smith (2001, 7) rightly argue, that “the vocabulary” and “concept of emotional geographies” are currently neglected in the turn to policy relevance “leaves a gaping void in how to both know and intervene in the world.” An analysis of homelessness

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as an emotional geography of displacement and a reevaluation of the potentially vital contribution of emotional knowledges to homelessness research, policy, and service delivery are both sorely needed. A more indepth understanding of homelessness as felt might, for example, force a needed reappraisal of service provision where the capacity to undertake crucial relationship-building activities and other emotional work with homeless people threatens to be subsumed because of a lack of services and a lack of adequate staffing. In such a context, not only do the “reserves of emotional understanding” of skilled service staff “largely remain untapped” but opportunities for support, for building sustaining relationships and for healing may be denied to those with “an urgent need for emotional engagement” (Chamberlayne, 2004, 346–47). As Anne Coleman (2000, 18) points out, traumatized clients whose needs may not be met quickly are not “attractive” in an “out-put” focused service delivery framework. It is deeply disturbing that significant barriers are faced in the provision of the kind of care often needed for healing and social reconnection when those presenting to or in need of services are likely to have experienced trajectories of trauma and “histories of emotional abuse and neglect” (Chamberlayne 2004, 341). In a more widely resonant critique, Fran Klodawsky, Tim Aubry and Susan Farrell (2006, 420) condemn the focus of the Canadian federal government on employability initiatives and note the problematic growing dependence of services on the funding that such initiatives entail: “Care is generally not part of current senior government agendas geared to marginalised youth and that as a result, there is a gap in funding that supports efforts of community organizations who work with homelessness youth.” The failure to care, as Chamberlayne (2004, 338) argues, only serves to perpetuate the revolving use of services—at great cost, it should also be added, not only to those homeless. In sum, when the significance to survival of even thinly provided care is clear, public policy that remains focused on “self-sufficiency” (Klodawsky, Aubry, and Farrell 2006, 420) risks re-abandoning rather than empowering homeless people. Recognition of homelessness felt and lived might help address the “disconnect” between “the bodies imagined in senior governmental discourses and policy construction” and those

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presenting in need to drop-in and accommodation services (ibid., 433). Redescription of the homeless, traumatized body in particular might instigate the reconfiguration of more appropriate funding for places of care in which the capacity for relationship building is acknowledged as a key process and outcome of service provision. Such redescription may also draw attention to the “geography of abuse” (Hall 1996, 29) that makes the identification and construction of alternative spaces of safety outside the familial home all the more pressing. Thrown into relief by the examination of displacement presented here is the intertwined intervention into bodily and social estrangement that being-in-place—not just any place—may enable. Made clear are homeless young people’s urgent needs for places of care and community and for “healing places” (Gesler 2003) that attend to “the non-visual senses and involve networks of interpersonal concern” (Gesler 1992, 738). Care in place for some young homeless people may need to be provided through accommodation services understood as more intensely therapeutic or even, for those experiencing the extreme forms of psychological and emotional suffering, through the sanctuary of asylum. Most commonly, young homeless people need access to independent accommodation with medium-term support and to generalist spaces of day care provided by support services that are specifically funded as multidimensional, multitargeted spaces. Multitargeted drop-in centers, as Peta Malins, John Fitzgerald, and Terry Threadgold (2006, 525) argue, are complex spaces of “camouflage” able to offer a range of identity-building resources for those experiencing marginalization. The location of all places of care—whether independent housing or drop-in services—should also be centrally considered as part of a wider strategy of addressing young homeless people’s geographical and social displacement from networks of family and friends and from neighborhoods or local areas. Most importantly, however, places of care should be capable of offering “spacefull” place, as Samantha described it. They must not only offer shelter or program participation but enable a stable, thickly felt, and lived engagement in the comfort and familiarity of place itself. As Kraybill (2007, 32) suggests, it is by offering a “hospitable presence” and place that “one makes it possible for the other person to experience

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a taste of being ‘at home.’” Hospitable, healing place allows for respite, remembering, and reconfiguration; it does not make demands. Hospitable place is homeplace, “where we return for renewal and self-recovery, where we heal our wounds and become whole” (hooks 1990, 49). Hospitable place is spacefull place in which both “lines of becoming” (Probyn 1996, 89) and rootedness are made possible. It is hospitable place that may enable differently imagined reengagements with corporeal, geographical, and social space. A felt approach to homelessness across policy and program development, service provision, and research is more crucial than ever as the caring spaces allowed for homeless bodies continue to shrink and harden. The hospitality of place is also more widely challenged through the violent erosion of the “everyday geographies of care” (Gesler 2005, 296), exemplified in the privatization of public space and in the scramble to render place “less ‘appealing’” to those homeless (May 2003, 44). It must be asked, what everyday found and spacefull places will be denied to those homeless? What places are left to the vulnerable and traumatized for remembering the future? And what places of care will also be denied, not just through their absence but through their underfunding, understaffing, and time restrictions? For what purpose, what gain? There is no economy in perpetuated suffering. In the face of such suffering and outside of the immediate demands of service provision and policy development, researchers must take the creative lead and ask themselves what they “hear” of homelessness felt and lived with their own bodies. They must ask what clues to experience and need do bodies—their own and others’—carry that may not be made visible through research that does not or cannot attend to somatic relationship of researched and researcher. How might being there with homeless people help open a new multisensory awareness of homeless people’s experiences, needs and hopes? Needed, in the context of well-supported and conceptualized research practice, is a willingness to make the researching self vulnerable, different, and unknowable, to put the researching self at the mercy of expected and unexpected emotional and physical strain in the attempt to resonate with and surface the felt-experiences of others. Needed is also a willingness to engage resonant forms of analysis and

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writing that can foreground bodily knowledge and to engage evocative languages that can offer the felt realm alternative articulation. Homelessness researchers must take responsibility for diversifying the ways in which homelessness is known and communicated, beginning, as I have argued here, with a more complex engagement with its felt dimensions. That homeless people’s lives are made grievable is the hinge on which hospitable responses to homelessness might depend. First, through its felt recognition, homelessness may be understood to centrally involve disembodiment, dislocation, and discordance resulting from corporeal, geographical, and social displacement. Second, represented as felt and lived, homelessness “might prompt us, affectively” (Butler 2004, 151) to make admissible in public policy and programs the anguished struggle to be at home and in place and to reconfigure supports to address the emotional harm, prolonged vulnerability, and delegitimization of compounded displacement. Remaking homelessness as felt keeps it open to the transformative potential of emotional politics. In such politics lies a doubled hope that the senselessness of homelessness can be remade.

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Index abuse: alcohol, 55, 108; bodily memories of,

bodily knowledge: development of,

54; centrality of, 53; coping mechanisms

106; as evidence, 17; felt-experience

for, 69–70; emotional, 142; geography

of others and, 28; of felt homeless-

of, 143; at home, xiii, 53, 54–59, 125, 143;

ness, 23–26; reflexivity and, 29–34; of

narratives of, 54, 55–56, 57, 58; statistics

researchers, 24–29

on, 54–55; suicidal behavior and, 75–76;

body-as-place, 27

traumatic experiences of, 54–59, 78. See

body memory: coping mechanisms for,

also drug abuse; sexual abuse

69–74; narratives of, 61, 62; of place,

accommodation services, xvi–xvii, 85, 92,

59–63; psychically homeless and, 78;

113–14, 120–23

self-harm and, 76; of trauma, 53, 54,

addiction, 73, 77, 90

59–68

affectivity, 6, 7, 8, 14, 37–38, 141

Bondi, Liz: on empathy, 35–36; on field-

alcohol abuse, 55, 108. See also drug abuse

work, 26; on incorporating others’

alienation, 87, 108–9

experiences, 38; on interviews, 39, 47;

Anderson, Kay, 141–42

on introjection and projection, 35, 40;

anthropological research, 11–12

on the self, 48

Aubry, Tim, 142

Bostock, Lisa, 83–84

Augé, Marc, 39

Bourdieu, Pierre, 18, 38–39, 105–6, 108–9, 113

authority, experiential, 16–17, 24

Brannock, Jillian, 9

Avramov, Dragana, 5

Buhrich, Neil, 55 Butler, Judith: on felt-experience, 10, 15, 19; on grief, 1, 21, 140; on vulnerability,

Bao, Wa-Ning, 56

49, 139; on woundedness, 47

belonging, xii, 6, 85, 104, 124 biographical narratives, 51 bodily displacement. See displacement

care, 142–44

bodily experience. See corporeal

Casey, Edward: on body, 64; on body

experience

memory, 59, 60; on disembodiment,

163

164

|

Index

Casey, Edward (cont.)

corporeography, 17–18, 23–50, 138–45;

67–68; on displacement, 7, 79, 81, 82; on

AHURI project and, xiii; drawbacks

place-panic, 81; on remembering-as-

of, 29, 46–50; empathy and, 35–39;

healing, 66; on self and place, 84; on

reflexivity and, 29–34; researchers’

subjects of place, 134; on thinned-out

bodily knowledge in, 25–29; sensabil-

place, 86, 100

ity and, 39–46

Cavell, Stanley, 136

Costello, Lauren N., 129

census data, 3–4

countertransference, corporeal, 36–37

Certeau, Michel de, 83, 84

Crane, Phil, 9

Chamberlain, Chris, 2–5

Crinall, Karen, 138–39

Chamberlayne, Prue, 1, 142

crisis accommodation services, xvi–xvii

Clifford, Judith, 16

cumulative trauma, xiii, 53, 132

Coffey, Amanda, 30 Coleman, Anne, 142 community, 105–29; acceptance by,

Das, Veena, 136

119–20, 126–28; alternative lifestyle,

de Certeau, Michel, 83, 84

126; feeling of abnormality and,

Derrida, Jacques, 38

109–19; as home, 8, 124; of homeless,

Desjarlais, Robert, 2, 10–11, 12, 21, 138

123–26, 129; narratives of, 121, 122, 123,

Diprose, Rosalyn, 23, 49

124–28; in search of, 119–29. See also

discordance, 22, 106, 109–11, 113, 134–35, 145

social displacement

discursive empathy, 27–28

compassion, 35, 37, 125 compassion fatigue, 48, 49–50

disembodiment, 134, 140, 145; displacement as, 22, 64; drug-related, 68–74;

confusion, empathetic, 36–37

trauma-related, 59, 66–74, 77–78. See

Cooper, Andrew, 1

also embodiment

coping mechanisms: drug abuse as, 55,

dislocation, 8–9, 134, 135, 145; displace-

68–74, 78; narratives of, 70, 71–73;

ment as, 21, 22, 79–80; grief-related,

self-harm as, 55, 68, 74–77, 78; suicidal

xiii; repeated experience of, 86; self-

behavior as, 74; trauma-related, 54, 58, 68–74; vagrancy as, 103 corporeal displacement, 64–68. See also trauma corporeal experience: compassion

harm and, 77 displacement: corporeal, 64–68; emotional geography of, 141–42; geographic, 79–87, 95, 104, 134–35; homelessness as, 7–8, 21–22, 131,

fatigue and, 49–50; corporeography

140; pain of, 28; as placelessness, 81;

and, 17–18; of cumulative trauma,

somatography of, 134; spatial, 103,

132; of displacement, 22; empathetic

105–6; trauma-related, 53–54, 64, 65,

identification and, 36–37; legitimacy

66–68, 135. See also emplacement;

of, 2; need for research on, 9–15,

social displacement

131; of pain, 63–64. See also body

dispossessed, the, 108–9

memory

dissociation, 67, 68

Index | distress, sentient, ix, 19–20, 28, 29, 137 Dittmar, Helga, 82, 87 Domosh, Mona, 12, 13

165

families: abusive, xiii, 53, 54–59, 125, 143; normal life of, 109, 113–17, 135; street, 123–26, 128

Downing-Orr, Kristina, 123, 125, 129

Farrell, Susan, 142

drop-in services, 96, 120, 122, 143–44

felt evidence, 14–17

drug abuse: as coping mechanism, 55,

felt-experience: bodily knowledge and, 28;

68–74, 78; cycles of, 72; daily life of,

centrality of, xiii–xv; communication

113; disembodiment from, 68–74;

of, 131; epistemological rupturings

identification with, 106–7; narratives

and, 9–15; as evidence, 15–17; of frag-

of, 70, 71–73, 87–88, 107; vs. normal life,

mentation, 64; of home, 6–7; sharabil-

115; as secondary issue, 73–74; social

ity of, 27–28; of social displacement,

displacement and, 108

109–10; of suffering, 136; of trauma,

Dumbleton, Susanne M., 81–82 Dunkley, Jane, 48

52–54, 58, 66–68; wounds from, 46–50 felt geography, 27 felt homelessness: age and, 20–21; bodily knowledge of, 23–26; core of, 131;

embodied intelligence, 37

corporeography of, 138–45; derealiza-

embodiment: displacement and, 22; ethic

tion of, 141; epistemological ruptur-

of, 28; felt-experience of, 59; in field-

ings and, 9–15; expression of, 8; public

work, 30, 32; placed, 62–63; Scott on,

policy and, xviii, 9, 136–37, 142–43, 144;

13; smashed, 68–74; trauma and, 53,

research on, 15–18, 134–38, 144–45;

66–67. See also disembodiment

visibility of, 11–12, 19

emotional experience: corporeography and, 17–18; of cumulative trauma, 132;

fieldwork, x, xi–xiii, xv, 30, 132. See also research

public policy and, 8; research on, 2,

Fitzgerald, John, 143

9–15, 131, 135–36, 142

found places, 95–100, 102, 103, 144

emotional geography, xv, 138, 141–42

fragmentation, 34, 48, 64, 135

emotional memory, 64–65, 76

Frank, Arthur, 139, 140

emotional pain, 76

friendship, 112, 125–27

empathetic identification, 29, 34, 35–37, 39, 48 empathy, 27–28, 35–39 emplacement, 62, 78, 131; Casey on, 81; corporeal, 29; social, 116, 128 environmental psychology, 6

geographic displacement, 79–87, 95, 104, 134–35 geographic networks, 7 geography: cultural, 6; displacement and,

ethnographic research, xi, 11, 24

22; emotional, xv, 138, 141–42; felt, 27;

evidence, 1, 14–17

invisible, 18; of social emplacement,

experience. See corporeal experience;

128; somatic, 61, 79

emotional experience; felt-experience experiential authority, 16–17, 24

Ginsberg, Robert, 82 Glass, James M., 68

166

|

Index

Goodman, Lisa, 56

interpretive research, 10, 12–13

grief, x–xi, xiii, 145; Butler on, 21; perma-

interviews, 20; emotional and ethical

nency of, 134; public policy and, 8; of

space in, 49; empathetic identifica-

researchers’, 140–41

tion in, 29, 35–36; intake, 33; research,

Grosz, Elizabeth, 14

33–34; sensability in, 39–46; therapeutic, 33 introjection, 35, 39–40

Hall, Joanne, 59, 66 Harvey, Mary, 56 healing, 66, 67, 77

Jackson, Michael, 23, 31

heroin. See drug abuse

Jacobs, Keith, 2

Hodder, Tracey, 55

Janus, Mark-David, 53–54

hollowed-out place, 86–95

Johns, Llewellyn, 6

home: abusive, xiii, 53, 54–59, 125, 143; accommodation services as, 85; childhood, 98–99; conceptualization of, 6–7,

Kafka, Franz, 108–9

8; normal, 109; as place, 6–7, 8, 85, 87,

Kaufman, Peter, 108, 128

95; as residence, 85, 86, 87, 95; as sense

Kawash, Samira, 7, 80, 81, 84–85

of community, 8, 124; vs. temporary

Kearns, Robin A., 102

accommodations, 113–14

Kemeny, Jim, 2

homeless community, 123–26, 129

Kirby, Vicky, 16, 17, 25

homelessness: conceptualization of,

Kleinman, Arthur, 136, 141

12–13; cycles of, 72; definition of,

Kleinman, Joan, 141

2–5, 6; exits from, xviii; long-term

Klodawsky, Fran, 142

(chronic), xvii, xviii, 5, 7, 128–29; pri-

knowledge: admissible, 1, 24; bodily, 17,

mal, 77–78; statistics on, xvi, 3–4

23–34, 106; felt, 14–15; of nurses, 25

homelessness research. See research

Kondora, Lori, 59, 66, 67

home-making, xii, 82–83, 86, 95

Kraybill, Ken, 143–44

Hopper, Kim, 139 hospitable places, 144, 145 housing, xv–xvi, 2, 3, 4

language, 19–22

Hoyt, Danny R., 56

Laurier, Eric, 24, 48, 49

hyperarousal, chronic, 65–66

Lawler, Jocalyn, 24, 25 Leder, Drew: on body memory, 63; on compassion, 35, 37; on empathy, 38; on

identification: with drug abuse, 106–7; empathetic, 29, 34, 35–37, 39, 48

pain, 28, 63–64; on sensability, 39 life, normal, 109, 113–17, 120, 135

identity, 84, 104, 107, 129

lifestyle trauma, 7

Imbimbo, Josephine E., 96

listening, 40, 45–46

intelligence, embodied, 37

Lock, Margaret, 136

Index | long-term homelessness, xvii, xviii, 5, 7, 128–29

167

peaceful places, 100 peer relationships, 111–12 personality disorders, 118–19 personhood, 103

MacKenzie, David, 2–5

phenomenological research, 11–12

Malins, Peta, 143

Philippot, Pierre, 49

Manzi, Tony, 2

physical abuse. See abuse

May, Jon, 85, 86, 87

physical pain, 19–20, 27, 63–64, 67, 76–77

memory, body. See body memory

placelessness: displacement as, 81;

memory, emotional, 64–65, 76

management of, 95–100; narratives of,

mental illness: fieldwork on, x, xii–xiii;

87–90, 91, 92, 94; place-making and,

narratives of, 117–19; social displace-

84–85; psychological, 68; trajectories

ment and, 117–19; trauma-related,

of, 79, 86–95, 134; transience and, 85,

54, 55

90–95, 104. See also displacement

Monk, Gerald, 27–28

place-making, xii, 82, 83, 84–85, 95

Moore, Jeanne, 95

place-panic, 81, 104

movement. See transience

place(s): of acceptance, 120-28; body mem-

multidisciplinary research, 132, 133

ory of, 59–63; concept of home and, 8; fieldwork on, xi–xii; found, 95–100, 102, 103, 144; hollowed-out, 86–95;

Nast, Heidi J., 29, 30, 31, 34

home as, 6–7, 85, 87, 95; hospitable,

needs: basic, 110, 111, 112; nonhousing,

144, 145; no self without, 84; nurtur-

xvi–xvii networks: geographic, 7; social, 7, 82, 86, 107–8, 129; survival, 84 normal life, 109, 113–17, 135 Nunan, Kate, 6 nurturing places, 102, 103

ing, 102, 103; peaceful, 100; placeless, 95; positive, 95; of sanctuary, 79, 86, 97–100, 143; secret, 96–98; spacefull, 100–103, 143; thick, 100; thinned-out, 86, 100; wilderness, 59, 60, 61–63 Polanyi, Michael, 17 policy. See public policy positivist approach, 12–13

observation, participant, 31 Okely, Judith, 26 otherness, 27, 39, 48

post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 64–65, 77–78 primal homelessness, 77–78 primary homeless, 3 projection, 35, 40

pain: acknowledgement of, 136; of

psychically homeless, 68, 78

displacement, 28; emotional, 76–77;

psychology, environmental, 6

physical, 19–20, 27, 63–64, 67, 76–77

psychosis, trauma-related, 68

Parr, Hester, 24, 27, 48, 49 participant observation, 31

PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), 64–65, 77–78

168

|

Index

public policy: academic researchers

Rivlin, Leanne, 10, 95, 96

and, 133; in Canada, 142; care and,

Robinson, Catherine, 83

142–44; felt homelessness and, 9,

rootedness, 61, 85, 93, 103, 144

136–37, 142–43, 144; housing focus of,

Roschelle, Anne, 107–8, 128

2; researchers’ grief and, 141; The Road

Rothschild, Babette, 65, 66, 68

Home on, xviii

rough sleeping, xvii, 3, 41, 43, 116 Rowe, Stacey, 82, 83, 84, 128, 129 Ruddick, Susan, 83

qualitative research, 2, 18

runaways, 53–54, 55–56

quantitative research, 2 safety, 32–33, 57–58, 143 Rao, Rameshwari, 76, 77

sanctuary, 79, 86, 97–100, 143

Read, Peter, 54

Saxe, Leonard, 56

recognition, search for, 108–9

Scarry, Elaine, ix, 19–20, 27

reflexivity, 29–34

Scott, Joan W., 11, 12, 13, 14, 28

rehabilitation, 71, 72, 73–74

secondary homeless, 3

relationship development, 126–27

secret places, 96–98

remembering-as-healing, 66, 67

seeing, 40–42

research: anthropological, 11–12; audi-

self: concept of home and, 6, 8; identity

ence for, 133; of corporeal experience,

and, 84, 104, 107; vs. other, 48; without

9–15, 131; of emotional experience,

place, 84

9–15, 131, 142; epistemological ruptur-

self-esteem, 84, 93, 125, 128, 129

ings and, 9–15; ethnographic, xi, 11,

self-harm, 55, 68, 74–77, 78

24; experiential evidence in, 16; on felt

sensability, 39–46

homelessness, 15–18, 134–38, 144–45;

sentient distress, ix, 19–20, 28, 29, 137. See

gaps in, 132–34; historical, 11–12; interpretive, 10, 12–13; interviews for,

also suffering services: accommodation, xvi–xvii, 85,

33–34; multidisciplinary, 132, 133;

92, 113–14, 120–23; drop-in, 96, 120,

phenomenological, 11–12; qualitative,

143–44; location of, 143–44; narratives

2, 18; quantitative, 2; social sciences,

of, 92, 121–22; nonhousing needs for,

2, 53, 135, 136; on suffering, 135–38;

xvi–xvii; support, xviii, 120–23, 128,

types of evidence used in, 1–2, 14–17. See also corporeography

142, 143–44 sexual abuse: bodily memories of, 54;

researchers, xv, 24–29, 49–50, 133, 140–41

centrality of, 53; coping mechanisms

research participants, xv, 24, 33, 48–49

for, 69–70; in family homes, 125;

residence, home as, 85, 86, 87, 95

statistics on, 54–55; suicidal behavior

retraumatization, 65–66

and, 75–76; traumatic experiences of,

risk-taking behavior, 108

54–59, 78

Index | sex workers, xi, 45 short-term homelessness, 7 Sinclair, Stacey L., 27–28 smelling, 40, 44–45, 112 Smith, Christopher J., 102

169

support services, xviii, 120–23, 128, 142, 143–44 Supported Accommodation Assistance Program, xvii survival networks, 84

Smith, Susan J., 141–42 social displacement, 22, 105–29; feeling of abnormality and, 109–19;

tasting, 40, 42–43

long-term homelessness and, 5–6;

Teesson, Maree, 55

narratives of, 107, 110, 111, 112–13,

temporary accommodation services, 85,

114–15, 116–17, 129; spatial displace-

92, 113–14

ment and, 105–6; survival of, 119;

tertiary homeless, 3

trauma of, 135

therapeutic interviews, 33

social emplacement, 128

thick places, 100

socialization, 106

thinned-out places, 86, 100

social networks, 7, 82, 86, 107–8, 129

Threadgold, Terry, 143

social sciences research, 2, 53, 135, 136

time, alienation in, 108–9

social services. See services

time-space discontinuity, 81–83, 95

somatic experience. See corporeal

Tomas, Annabel, 82, 87

experience somatic geography, 61, 79

touching, 40, 43–44 transience: narratives of, 87–90, 91, 92,

somatic memory. See body memory

93, 94; patterns of movement and,

somology, 25

80–81, 82–86; placelessness and,

Sontag, Susan, 10, 130, 138, 139

85–86, 90–95, 104; socialization and,

space, 7, 81–83, 95, 108–9 spacefull places, 100–103, 143

107; substance abuse and, 90 trauma: body memory of, 53, 54,

spatial contestations, 84

59–68; central role of, 78; conse-

spatial displacement, 103, 105–6

quences of, 58; coping mechanisms

squatters, 3, 71, 87, 99–100, 117

for, 54, 58, 68–74; cumulative, xiii, 53,

status, social, 108–9

132; disembodiment from, 59, 66–74,

street families, 123–26, 128

77–78; displacement from, 53–54, 65,

substance abuse. See alcohol abuse; drug

66–68, 135; experiences of abuse as,

abuse suffering: derealization of, 19–20; home-

54–59; felt-experience of, 52–54, 58, 66–68; homelessness as, 56; lifestyle,

lessness as, xviii, 135–38; meaningful

7; mental illness and, 54, 55; mul-

representations of, 138–41; nameless,

tiple, 77–78; narratives of, 51–53, 54,

15; public policy and, 8–9; research on,

55–56, 57, 58; reinstatement of, 64–65;

137–38; trauma-related, 53

remembering-as-healing and, 66;

suicidal behavior, 55, 68–74, 75–76

vicarious, 48

170

|

Index

vagrancy, 85–86, 103, 104. See also transience

Whitbeck, Les B., 56 Wikan, Unni, 37

van der Kolk, Bessel, 59, 65

wilderness places, 59, 60, 61–63

Veness, April, 6, 80, 85

Williams, Malcolm, 10

vulnerability, 7, 46–50, 139, 140–41

Winchester, Hilary P. M., 129 Wolch, Jennifer, 82, 83, 84, 128, 129 Wolff, Kurt H., 38–39, 47–48, 50

walking, 83–84

woundedness, 46–50

Wardhaugh, Julia, 6

Wright, Talmadge, 11, 13

Wasserfall, Rahel, 27 Watson, Sophie, 10 Whelan, Thomas A., 48

Young, Leslie, 51, 59, 67, 77, 78