The Construction of Homelessness as a Social Category
Description
This PhD dissertation project tackles the formation, contestation, and implications of homelessness as a social category. Focusing on the political and professional fields, this project specifically intends to investigate the discourses that both government and non-government organizations use when discussing this social problem. Homelessness is namely a malleable social construct that both governments and non-government organizations help shape as they discuss how this social problem should be tackled.
Generally speaking, governmental discourses tend to emphasize literal rooflessness, while non-governmental discourses often incorporate a wider range of housing situations. The definitions of homelessness that different institutions use help us account for the changes in homelessness through time and space, but are also informed by different actors’ interests. Governments are said to adopt narrow definitions to simplify counting and minimize service coverage. Non-government organizations prefer broader definitions to convince policymakers that homelessness is a crisis, potentially expanding their political relevance and increasing the demand for the services they provide.
As the main definers of and the primary service providers to this population, governments and non-government organizations wield sizable symbolic power over the construction of homelessness. They shape how homelessness is understood in terms of who homeless people are, and what should be done to address homelessness. Thus, through the deployment of the institutional categories that these actors use they delineate who the homeless are and which services they may be entitled to receive. In some cases, these categories and the discourses that these actors use can create sub-populations of homeless people in order to rationalize service eligibility. This is why as various understandings of homelessness diffuse into wider society, these discourses can end up turning ‘the homeless’ into as a distinct class that can be differentiated from other impoverished groups; a category that can be defined by specific spatial and social attributes.
This dissertation project – which is still in its design phase as of 2024 – will rely on a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis which will include the textual analysis of policies, laws, reports, and other media, as well as interviews with government and non-government actors. Currently, the possibility of situating the study within a single country case, comparatively within the Global South, or among international government and non-government organizations is being evaluated.
Dissertation Supervisors: Prof Miguel A. Martinez (Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University) & Prof Matilda Hellman (Department of Sociology)