Academic Knowledge and Contemporary Poverty

Author(s): David Farrugia and Jessica Gerrard

Source: Sociology , Vol. 50, No. 2 (APRIL 2016), pp. 267-284
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26556429

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564436
research-article2014
SOC0010.1177/0038038514564436SociologyFarrugia and Gerrard

Article

Sociology
2016, Vol. 50(2) 267­–284
Academic Knowledge and © The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0038038514564436
The Politics of Homelessness soc.sagepub.com

Research

David Farrugia
University of Newcastle, Australia

Jessica Gerrard
University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract
This article explores the field of homelessness research in relation to the dynamics of
contemporary inequality and governmentality, arguing that the dominant perspectives within
this field have developed in ways that can converge with the demands of neoliberal governance.
The article discusses the causal focus of much homelessness research, the emergence of
the ‘orthodoxy’ of homelessness research and new approaches emphasising subjectivity and
arguing for a ‘culture of homelessness’. We suggest that homelessness has been constructed
as a discrete analytical object extraordinary to the social relations of contemporary inequality.
The authority to represent homelessness legitimately has been constituted through positioning
‘the homeless’ outside of a community of valorised and normatively legitimate subjectivities.
The article concludes with reflections on an alternative politics of homelessness research that
moves towards a critical engagement with the position of homelessness within the structural
dynamics of late modernity.

Keywords
homelessness, inequality, neoliberalism

Corresponding author:
David Farrugia, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, New South
Wales, 2308, Australia.
Email: david.m.farrugia@newcastle.edu.au

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268 Sociology 50(2)

Introduction
[T]he act of naming helps to establish the structure of this world, and does so all the more
significantly the more widely it is recognized, that is, authorized. (Bourdieu, 1991: 105)

Sociological research is invariably steeped in the politics of power and privilege. As

Bourdieu (1991) asserts, the act of naming – of representing social experience – carries
significant symbolic power, particularly when authorised by the academy. Unsurprisingly
given the academy’s long-standing interest in marginality, disadvantage and ‘the other’,
academic knowledge has been subject to challenge and critique from a range of stand-
points in the attempt to unveil and upend the taken-for-granted assumptions and autho-
rial positions on which research narratives are based. Post-colonial, feminist and queer
perspectives have all contributed to this task, working to destabilise and problematise
basic assumptions surrounding the construction of research narratives (e.g. Butler, 1993;
Haraway, 1988; Lawrence, 1982; Skeggs, 2004). Research, Roisin Ryan-Flood and
Rosalind Gill (2009: 1) recently observed, always ‘involves secrets and silences’. Such
secrets and silences can be found in the epistemological frames of research, in the deter-
mination of ‘what counts’ and in the technologies and practices of interpretation and
representation. Indeed, the act of naming, identifying, describing, counting and measur-
ing the disadvantaged, poor or marginalised ‘other’ reveals much about normative under-
standings and assumptions, about what it is to be ‘mainstream’, ‘successful’, ‘typical’,
and acts of recognition within academic research create power relationships between
academic subjects and research objects. These relationships, as we explore in this article,
have consequences for the production and experience of wider inequalities.
This article examines the intellectual politics of representation in relation to research
on contemporary poverty. We focus our attention on one of the most ‘visible’ research
subjects: homelessness. In doing so, we explore the ‘silences and secrets’, and attendant
political consequences of the intellectual practices through which homelessness is recog-
nised as a ‘social problem’. The homelessness research field is a fertile opportunity to
examine the politics of academic knowledge: the visible presence of homelessness has
prompted substantial policy and research interest internationally, and research narratives
have played a central role in the constitution of homelessness as a significant and politi-
cally visible matter of concern. This research attention represents a genuine desire to
bring attention to, and contribute to the alleviation of, homelessness. At the same time,
the political investments driving homelessness research create entanglements between
research narratives and the discursive definitions and pragmatic requirements of welfare
service interventions (Pleace and Quilgars, 2003). Indeed, in a widely cited review,
Fitzpatrick et al. (2000: 49) have suggested that informing social policy is the only ethi-
cal justification for homelessness research.
In what follows, we examine the ways in which the coalescing research and policy
attention on homelessness contributes to developing ‘homelessness’ as an object of
knowledge, and explore the repercussions of this for understanding the intellectual poli-
tics of contemporary poverty. As Bacchi (2009) has argued, the government of the social
world is in part accomplished through processes of problematisation. Systems of social
relations are enacted in the definition of, and intervention into, discrete social ‘problems’

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Farrugia and Gerrard 269

and ‘problem populations’. In contemporary capitalist societies, the government of pov-

erty takes place primarily through the subjectivities or ‘souls’ (Rose, 1999) of those who
are deemed unable or unwilling to live up to contemporary definitions of ethical person-
hood focusing primarily on productivity and personal rationality (Cruikshank, 1993;
Dean and Hindess, 1998; McDonald and Marston, 2005). To this literature we contribute
an account of the construction of research objects as part of the political investments that
motivate social policy interventions into poverty. In what follows we explore academic
research as a cultural practice through which contemporary social relations are consti-
tuted as intelligible, normatively evaluable and politically governable. In the intellectual
politics of homelessness research we find a research focus on observable, measurable
and ameliorable social problems and the desire to ‘recuperate’ those who are deemed to
be failing or excluded (Haylett, 2001) either through coercion or therapeutic interven-
tion. Following Bacchi (2009), the effect of this is the constitution and normative legiti-
mation of a neoliberal imagining of the social world through the identification of problem
subjects. In this sense, homelessness is one problematisation through which the social
relations of contemporary capitalist societies are orchestrated and governed.
First, we examine the intersections between the emergence of homelessness as a dedi-
cated field of research and a site for policy intervention. Here, we trace the ways in which
the search for causal determinants and pathways out of homelessness is intertwined with
a policy desire to render homelessness a discrete, calculable and governable social prob-
lem. Second, we examine how the positioning of homelessness as a discrete analytical
object serves to disassociate its causes from the wider social relations of contemporary
inequality. As a result, homelessness has become constituted as ‘outside’ of a community
of normatively legitimate and ‘socially included’ neoliberal subjectivities (see Skeggs,
2011), and made governable according to the epistemological demands of neoliberal
governmentality. Last, we reflect on an alternative politics of homelessness research that
moves towards a critical engagement with the position of homelessness within the struc-
tural dynamics of late modernity.

Homelessness as an Object of Knowledge

Experiences like homelessness are a persistent feature of capitalist societies: experiences
of vagrancy, destitution, itinerant work, work houses, boarding houses and ‘lying in
homes’ for ‘wayward’ women, all point to the ways in which homelessness is embedded
within wider social, cultural and economic processes – past and present. However, con-
temporary homelessness in advanced capitalist nations is inextricably enmeshed with
crises in housing and homelessness in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the ‘rediscovery’ of
poverty following the post-depression and Second World War welfare state settlements
that, in different ways, characterised the UK, Australia and the USA (Hollingworth,
1972). At this time, the rising occurrence and visibility of ‘rough sleeping’ in cities across
these countries was accompanied by a growing acknowledgement of the diversity and
complexity of homelessness. Associated with this was the development of a diverse
research field examining the specific social dynamics surrounding homelessness. This
research activity led to an acknowledgement of women’s homelessness and issues

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270 Sociology 50(2)

surrounding domestic violence (e.g. Edwards et al., 1977), indigenous land displacement
(e.g. O’Donoghue, 1998) and migration within and across national borders.
Past and present, the field of homelessness research extends beyond the academy.
Welfare services, charities and homelessness advocacy organisations, state organisations
and academics, all fund and participate in research in order to bring attention to home-
lessness as a significant social policy concern. A result of much of this research and
advocacy activity has been increased interest of the state in identifying, and intervening
into, homelessness. From the late 1970s and 1980s and into the present, countries such
as the USA, Australia and the UK have attempted a range of direct (if modest) policy
interventions into homelessness (see Minnery and Greenhalgh, 2007). There are, there-
fore, complex relationships between the state, policy regimes, service delivery, advocacy
and campaign organisations, and homelessness research. Importantly, these relationships
are often inflected with operations of power ensuing from funding allocations. In
Australia, for instance, the landmark 2008 policy ‘The Road Home’ heralded the need for
research, but stipulated what sort of research would be funded on the basis of its per-
ceived utility for policy and practice.
As homelessness has garnered increasing political and research attention, researchers
have increasingly constructed homelessness as a ‘multifaceted’ and ‘complex’ phenom-
enon. Subsequently, policy interventions have become more diverse, specialised and tar-
geted, with a range of homelessness specific services emerging to address the ‘complex
needs’ of homeless populations. These include short-term refuges and shelters, youth and
women’s refuges, boarding houses, medium-term or transitional housing services, coun-
selling, physical and mental health services, sexual health outreach workers, drug and
alcohol treatment facilities and services offering legal assistance or advice on ‘independ-
ent living skills’ (Carlen, 1996; Minnery and Greenhalgh, 2007; Ravenhill, 2008).
Moreover, the causes and definitions of homelessness have varied according to the polit-
ical claims made by governmental bodies, charities and advocacy agencies engaged in its
construction and contestation. These (ongoing) shifts in definitions and meanings of
homelessness arise out of debates and struggle wrought by state bodies, homelessness
advocacy and campaign organisations, and charities, all of whom have made competing
claims about the origins and political significance of homelessness (Cronley, 2010;
Hutson and Liddiard, 1994).
Gowan (2010) has described the political contestation of homelessness in terms of
‘sin talk’, ‘sick talk’ and ‘system talk’, or discourses which lay the causes for homeless-
ness at the feet of moral culpability, pathological incapacity or structural inequality
respectively. These discourses produce distinct and divergent solutions, suggesting either
punishment, treatment or collective mobilisation and social change. Explaining and rep-
resenting homelessness is therefore a contested, and politically and morally charged,
enterprise. The intense politicisation of the causes of homelessness is particularly sug-
gestive: as the enormous volume of homelessness research indicates, homelessness
appears to demand explanation, and the explanations given are saturated with political
and moral meanings. Popular explanations for homelessness often centre on the moral
culpability or pathology of homeless individuals (Gowan, 2010), and ‘system talk’ has
frequently been marginalised in favour of individualistic explanations. Debate about the
causes of homelessness is therefore one site at which the meaning of inequality in

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Farrugia and Gerrard 271

contemporary capitalist societies is debated and the moral worth of those who experience
homelessness contested.
While the causes of and solutions to homelessness are debated, in what follows we
discuss a body of work organised around a coherent set of themes and debates that have,
through their relationship with social policy regimes, become hegemonic in the English-
speaking research literature. The parallel epistemological assumptions and political
motivations underlying this literature facilitate its collection into reviews by authors such
as Fitzpatrick et al. (2000), Neale (1997), Pleace and Quilgars (2003) and Somerville
(2013). Here, we discuss developments in the theoretical and epistemological basis of
this hegemonic homelessness research. We begin with a discussion of what has been
termed the ‘orthodoxy’ of homelessness research. While the ‘orthodoxy’ of homeless-
ness research is identified primarily by British authors, it draws together epistemological
and political tendencies that resonate internationally in research and policy development,
and thus provides a fertile analytical focus with far reaching implications. We then exam-
ine the subsequent developments in the field that both critique and build upon this ortho-
doxy, including ‘pathways’ analysis and contemporary arguments for a ‘culture of
homelessness’. We then consider the politics of the intellectual knowledge surrounding
homelessness in the context of contemporary governance, drawing parallels between the
theoretical development of this field and the epistemological requirements of neoliberal
governmentality.

The Search for Causes and the Orthodoxy in Homelessness Research

The search for causes is central to international policy and intervention oriented home-
lessness research. One of the basic issues in this field concerns the relative contribution
of ‘individual’ and ‘structural’ factors in causing homelessness. Striking some kind of
balance between causal factors said to be located within individuals (such as relationship
breakdown, drug and alcohol addiction or pre-existing mental illness) and factors located
within structures (such as unemployment, benefit levels and housing supply stocks) con-
tinues as the main goal of homelessness research. The task of balancing ‘individual’ and
‘structural’ causal factors is now explicitly described as an ‘orthodoxy’ or ‘consensus’ in
this field by the widely cited reviews of Fitzpatrick (2005), May (2000), Pleace (2000)
and Somerville (2013). Research debates about the relative weight of different causal
factors have been central to the construction and visibility of homelessness as a public
issue and social policy concern.
One significant contribution to the emergence of this orthodoxy is risk-factor analy-
sis, an approach that identifies and delineates factors relating to the lives of individuals
which may predispose them to becoming homeless. In risk-factor analysis, each causal
factor is operationalised as a discrete, quantitatively measurable variable that relates to a
particular individual or population. In principle, this renders calculable the different risk
factors that cause homelessness, as well as the probability of different individuals or
populations experiencing homelessness. Researchers across a number of disciplines
have identified a vast constellation of problematic attributes, characteristics or biograph-
ical experiences that place individuals at an increased risk of homelessness. These are
impossible to summarise here, but include factors such as physical and mental health

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272 Sociology 50(2)

diagnoses, past involvement in violence or criminal activity, experiences of abuse, drug

and alcohol use or ‘incomplete’ and ‘blended’ families (e.g. Caton et al., 2005; De Man
et al., 1993; Shelton et al., 2009; Van Der Ploeg and Scholte, 1997). In contexts such as
the United States, individual level risk factors remain the dominant explanation for
homelessness (Cronley, 2010).
However, critiques of this kind of analysis have identified the individualistic nature of
these risk factors. In response, researchers have added ‘structural’ variables to the list of
risk factors (such as ‘poverty’ or experiences of unemployment); identified ‘structural
determinants’ (such as levels of unemployment, or availability of housing stock) (Lee et al.,
2003; Kemp et al., 2001); or highlighted unemployment and low benefit levels as back-
ground causal factors (Fitzpatrick et al., 2000). As such, a combination of these risk fac-
tors makes up the ‘consensus’ or ‘orthodoxy’ of homelessness research. That is, it has
become accepted that homelessness is caused by some combination of individually and
structurally located risk factors, determinants or causes, in which individual level vulner-
abilities place certain individuals at greater risk of succumbing to the structural causes of
homelessness (Fitzpatrick, 2005; May, 2000; Pleace, 2000; Somerville, 2013). Social
policy interventions may thereby be designed which address the impact of these risk fac-
tors on those at risk of homelessness.
The identification of risk factors has been central to the emergence of what Somerville
(2013) has called an ‘epidemiological’ approach to homelessness research. The ever-
growing constellation of risk factors associated with homeless populations defines the
‘complexity’ of homelessness as a phenomenon characterised by factors that can form
the basis for interventions. These interventions are carried out by a wide variety of ser-
vices, each of which addresses one or a constellation of risk factors. Ranging from drug
and alcohol workers, counsellors and employment schemes, each of these services has
mobilised different risk factors as ways to ameliorate the problem of homelessness.
Providing a means by which causal factors can be identified and made measurable, risk
factor analysis has been central to the construction of homelessness as an object of
governance.

Pathways and Cultures

In the most recent theoretical intervention into this field, Somerville (2013) critiques the
‘epidemiological’ approach to homelessness research and argues for a renewed attention
to the active means by which individuals make sense of their lives and thereby negotiate
the structures and institutions that influence whether they become homeless. Somerville
(2013) lends his voice to advocates of the ‘pathways’ approach to homelessness research,
as well as Ravenhill’s (2008) arguments for a ‘culture of homelessness’. Pathways analy-
sis has become increasingly significant in recent years in Australia and the United
Kingdom (see Somerville (2013) for a comprehensive review of this work). It shares
with arguments about a ‘culture of homelessness’ a desire to emphasise the agency and
subjectivity of those who experience homelessness in explaining their continued home-
lessness or their success in escaping homelessness to make a home.
First promoted in housing research by authors such as Anderson and Tulloch (2000)
and Clapham (2003) and taken up by researchers reviewed in Somerville (2013),

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Farrugia and Gerrard 273

pathways research aims to account for the role of agency and subjectivity in the way that
homelessness is negotiated and in the ultimate housing outcomes of the homeless. It is
also designed to provide a biographical perspective, in which structures are seen to
‘underpin’ (Anderson, 2001: 3) the practices through which people negotiate homeless-
ness. With these conceptual goals in mind: ‘homelessness is to be understood primarily
as an event or sequence of events or an episode or episodes that occur(s) at a point in a
pathway that someone follows through the housing system’ (Somerville, 2013: 389–
390). The aim of the pathways approach is to respond to the ‘problematic life events and
associated care needs’ (Anderson, 2001: 2) of different homeless individuals. As such,
the methodological approach taken is the identification of pathways according to a num-
ber of demographic variables and causal factors. These include age, with different path-
ways for young people and adults (Anderson and Tulloch, 2000; Chamberlain and
Johnson, 2013), as well as a whole host of different risk factors that are identified and
confirmed as significant influences, including unemployment, drug use, the experience
of violence and trauma, domestic violence, psychiatric diagnoses, experiences of sleep-
ing rough and use of different housing services. Each of these factors characterises a
particular pathway, including those which see an individual negotiate the welfare system
to become homed eventually, or those which end in continued homelessness.
The pathways metaphor also provided the basis for a new focus on homeless subjec-
tivities, termed the ‘culture of homelessness’ by Ravenhill (2008). Situated within a
pathways framework, Ravenhill (2008: 1) sets out to ‘look anew at the causes or triggers
of homelessness’. Research, Ravenhill contends, has overlooked the existence of ‘a
[homeless] counterculture created through people being pushed out of mainstream soci-
ety’ (2008: 3). Becoming homeless means that ‘rather than being made to dress, act and
behave in a manner compatible with mainstream society, they instead choose to create a
society in which they are the norm’ (2008: 154). This choice is part of the search for
meaning by individuals alienated from ‘the predictable norms, values and expectations
of the mainstream … making it difficult or impossible to leave and re-engage with the
seemingly hostile mainstream society’ (2008: 157). Drawing on the language of risk-
factor analysis, Ravenhill argues for interventions that encourage homeless individuals
to leave the culture of homelessness by ‘artificially stimulat[ing] counterbalances and
protecting factors when they don’t exist in an individual’s life’ (2008: 95).
Despite the renewed focus on agency in these approaches, there is an epistemological
continuity between risk-factor analysis, pathways analysis and the culture of homeless-
ness, stemming from the role of research in the political response to homelessness. Both
pathways approaches and arguments for a culture of homelessness are explicitly aimed
at ameliorating the problem of homelessness through better designed welfare services.
This is why factors identified as significant in the structuring of pathways in and out of
homelessness originate, as discussed by Somerville (2013), in risk factors understood to
influence the causation of homelessness. The emphasis on agency and practice in this
approach is situated within the framework of risk factors in the attempt to demonstrate
how risk factors are actively negotiated by people who are homeless. In this sense, the
kind of agency that the pathways approach recognises is the process by which causal
factors are realised and, in practice, translated into different individual biographies. The
progression from risk factors through to pathways and cultures is united by the pragmatic

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274 Sociology 50(2)

priorities of policy formation and service delivery, which require the identification of
‘levers’ for therapeutic or social welfare interventions.

Neoliberalism, Poverty and Social Exclusion: Homelessness

as a Technical Problem
Here we reflect on the way in which the epistemological progression of homelessness
research relates to the changing discursive terrain of social policy in late modernity,
demonstrating how homelessness is a site in which the normative social relations of
contemporary capitalism are constituted and governed. While previous approaches have
searched for more methodologically satisfying accounts of the way that causal factors
are translated into individual subjectivities, in this section we interrogate the social and
political consequences of a research agenda driven by the search for causes as such.
Thus, we take a step back from the drive to create more robust causal explanations, or
better service delivery, in order to explore homelessness research as a problematisation
through which wider social relations are constituted (Bacchi, 2009). We argue that the
field of homelessness research has treated structural inequalities, or relationships between
power, privilege and poverty, as technical problems, or extraordinary malfunctions of an
otherwise unremarkable and unproblematic social terrain. The consequences of this
extend beyond the individualisation of structural inequalities to the silent constitution of
a governable ‘post-welfare social’ (Flint, 2003, 2004).

The Neoliberal Orthodoxy and the ‘Objects’ of Research

As observed by Foucault (2007) in his history of the emergence of the practices of
government constitutive of the modern nation state, discursive regimes (like neoliber-
alism) draw together and constitute a social that can be governed according to the
subjects and relations defined by the discourse. Governmentality theorists (Burchell,
1991; Rose, 1991) have positioned the shift from welfare liberal to neoliberal modes
of governance as central to the contemporary politics of poverty and privilege. The rise
of neoliberal governmentality has reimagined the political subject of governance: from
a subject with obligations to the state that can only be fulfilled when supported by
universally available welfare services, to the valorisation of an individual consumer
who succeeds or fails according to their capacity to manage the social and economic
world reflexively. In the name of this reimagined subject, the state has privatised its
welfare functions and developed technologies to monitor and audit its outsourced
functions – what Rose and Miller (1992) call ‘government at a distance’. Peck and
Tickell (2002) have described these two dimensions of neoliberal governmentality as
‘roll-back’ and ‘roll-out’ neoliberalism.
Historically, concerns over individual depravity and laziness – imbued with the poli-
tics of gender, race and class – have characterised many different social welfare regimes
across nation states (see Huey and Kemple, 2007). Most recently, however, the neolib-
eral emphasis on individual reflexivity and market rationality has led to the curtailing of
welfare benefits in many modern capitalist countries, including the United Kingdom, the

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Farrugia and Gerrard 275

United States and Australia. Indeed, low welfare benefits and lack of housing following
the privatisation and selling off of social housing stocks have been described as causal
factors in the creation of contemporary homelessness in the United Kingdom (Fitzpatrick
et al., 2000). Individualistically oriented risk-factor analysis, which operationalises the
causes of homelessness as risk factors located within individuals, continues to have a
strong influence on the way in which homelessness is understood and researched, par-
ticularly in the United States (Gowan, 2010). This kind of analysis is also the basis for
interventions into homelessness which draw on medical or psychotherapeutic discourses
to construct homelessness as a pathology in need of personalised therapeutic interven-
tion. The enforcement of therapeutic interventions is often a condition of funding for
homelessness service provision (Lyon-Callo, 1998, 2000), and the performance of medi-
calised subjectivities are a part of day to day life in homelessness services (Desjarlais,
1997; Lyon-Callo, 2000).
Undoubtedly, the emergence of an ‘orthodoxy’ within the homelessness research field
which includes ‘structural’ variables in causal analysis represents one attempt by
researchers to critique individualistic moralism. If homelessness is caused by factors
located outside the individual, then homeless people can be deemed deserving of state
support according to the terms of welfare liberalism. However, the capacity for home-
lessness research to develop an understanding of the social and political conditions that
surround homelessness is not only to do with the way that individuals are imagined
(although this is certainly relevant and should not be ignored). It is as much to do with
the way in which structural causes are theorised, operationalised and related to homeless
people’s lives. This is particularly important given that under neoliberalism relations of
power and privilege are considered technical problems solvable through targeted and
more efficient interventions into different problematic sites (Peck and Tickell, 2002).
Here, relationships of inequality and oppression are interpreted through a definition of
the social world characterised by the rational conduct of reflexive individuals within a
marketised public. As a consequence, the poverty and privilege that structure contempo-
rary capitalist societies is understood as separate from, and extraordinary to, the wider
social relationships through which the ‘normal’ functioning of capitalist societies takes
place. Social problems like homelessness are constructed as anomalies or isolated mal-
functions with specific mechanisms that can be manipulated and thereby ameliorated.
The construction of such problems as extraordinary contributes to a research and pol-
icy desire to understand homelessness in terms of the factors or determinants that may
cause it. This imperative coalesces – often with very different political and research
intentions – with an understandable desire to respond practically and immediately in
order to assist the men, women and children who experience homelessness. As discussed
earlier, homelessness appears to demand causal explanation, and the causal explanations
provided are a site at which ‘the homeless’ may be constructed as either pathological
sinners or victims of structural circumstance. In homelessness research, causal analysis
converges with neoliberal governmentality by abstracting and disconnecting relations of
power and privilege from their social context and reifying them as isolated variables
defining different isolated problems. These variables then become ‘levers’ for interven-
tion: different factors can be manipulated by different governmental actors with the aim

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276 Sociology 50(2)

of lessening the risk of homelessness that different populations, identified by the causes
of their problem, may face.
There are, following Bacchi (2009), discursive, material and lived consequences of
this problematisation: the policy response to the influence of ‘structural’ variables in this
problematisation includes offers of support from employment agencies, training schemes
and budgeting assistance in order that the influence of these variables on the lives of
people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless may be reduced (Gerrard,
2013). The silent (and unintended) consequence of the desire to ameliorate homelessness
within the terms of a neoliberal imagining of the social world, is the representation of
homelessness as a discrete social problem caused by isolatable mechanisms and the
rehearsal of problematic discourses of individual success and failure. As a result, and as
we turn to now, a silently present ‘mainstream norm’ is left unexamined.

Roll-Out Neoliberalism, Social Exclusion and Homelessness

After the ‘roll back’ of the welfare state contributed to sharp rises in social inequality
(creating what Marsh and Kennett (1999) referred to as the ‘new terrain’ of contemporary
homelessness), roll-out neoliberalism was accompanied by new forms of policy rhetoric.
Increasingly, the concept of ‘social exclusion’ has been used to describe the visible and
entrenched inequalities that accompanied the dismantling of the welfare state. Social
exclusion discourses defined a large and heterogeneous excluded group who were not
benefitting from economic growth, encompassing the unemployed, welfare benefit
recipients, single mothers and the homeless. In social exclusion rhetoric, the ‘excluded’
are defined against an unexamined ‘included mainstream’. Consequently, policies aimed
to ‘re-insert’ or ‘re-integrate’ the excluded into ‘the mainstream’ through a mixture of
therapeutic and coercive interventions (such as case management and ‘workfare’
schemes) (Bowring, 2000; Dean and Hindess, 1998; Lodemel and Trickey, 2001). The
agency of the excluded, therefore, was understood as either failure/resistance, or as a
means to inclusion. While the existence of structural inequalities was acknowledged,
their significance was reduced to the existence of disincentives for inclusion (Lodemel
and Trickey, 2001).
In the United Kingdom and Australia (and more recently in the USA), social inclusion
agendas provided renewed funding for homelessness research, and there are parallels
between social exclusion discourses and developments in homelessness research. The
pathways approach participates in the construction of excluded individuals, defining
homelessness as an event or episode that takes place during an individual’s pathway
through the housing system. By positioning agency as the means by which risk factors
are translated into biographies, the structural inequalities that surround homelessness are
reduced to constellations of factors that may act as disincentives to the rational negotia-
tion of a pathway back to housed society. This is also the case for arguments about a
culture of homelessness, which Ravenhill (2008) frequently contrasts with the (unde-
fined and unexamined) ‘mainstream’. Homelessness is positioned as both a space exter-
nal to the mainstream, and a barrier to individuals returning to mainstream society. Those
who are excluded through their participation in the culture of homelessness must there-
fore have these barriers removed in order that they may mobilise reflexive subjectivities

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Farrugia and Gerrard 277

in their navigation back to the mainstream. In both cases, the ‘mainstream’ lurks in the
research background: silent, but essential for the representation of homelessness as
‘other’.
Almost two decades ago Pleace (1998) argued that homelessness research was too
focused on homelessness as a discrete ‘social problem’ and not focused enough on the
wider social context. Neale (1997) bemoaned the superficial theorising of homelessness
research, arguing for more engagement with critical and feminist theory. Since this time,
homelessness research has continued to develop at a distance from the theoretical insights
and priorities of sociological theory and critical social policy analysis. As a cultural prac-
tice, homelessness research has been guided by the political imperatives of policy inter-
vention. There is, of course, a very understandable concern within the homelessness
research field to contribute knowledge that might assist to alleviate the pain and trauma
of homelessness. In large part, research is driven by a desire to raise the public and politi-
cal profile of homelessness. Nevertheless, this desire has contributed to the increasingly
autonomous development of this field, creating an authorial position which often situates
homelessness outside of the normal functioning of the social world.

Towards an Unruly Politics of Homelessness Research

Our discussion so far of the relationship between political investments, policy interven-
tions and research epistemologies has been motivated by an alternative politics of home-
lessness research. By way of conclusion, in this final section of the article we sketch out
what this alternative politics might mean for representing, understanding and researching
homelessness. A critical politics of homelessness research must step outside the narrow
epistemological requirements of neoliberal governmentality and the normative bounda-
ries between ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ that underpin hegemonic homelessness research.
Yet, it must also account for the consequences of these discourses and distinctions on the
way that homelessness is positioned within the social fabric of contemporary capitalist
societies. This requires research approaches that do not begin from the assumption that
the generation of better policy and/or service delivery must be the primary justification
for homelessness research. There is a need to generate insight and understanding of
homelessness beyond what is pragmatically allowable or sayable within contemporary
neoliberal policy paradigms. In fact, there is a need to examine what is allowable or say-
able (or fundable), and how this is constructed through discourses of risk, pathways,
cultures and inclusion/exclusion. Correspondingly, there is a need to examine critically
what are the normative assumptions surrounding what counts as ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in
contemporary neoliberal society, and the consequences of this for those who are targeted
for intervention and assistance (Gerrard and Farrugia, 2014).
This endeavour is complicated by the social consequences of the intellectual activity
that we have traced so far. As we have argued, homelessness is embedded within rela-
tions of power and privilege that escape research approaches focused either on individual
malfunction or on the causal power of ‘poverty’ on the lives of deviant populations.
However, as Bacchi (2009) has argued, textual practices of representation and problema-
tisation have discursive, material and lived consequences. Shelters have been con-
structed, individuals have been case managed, identities have been forged, and an object

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278 Sociology 50(2)

or problem called ‘homelessness’ has emerged as a site where the normative social rela-
tionships of neoliberal capitalism can be constituted, rehearsed and governed. As in
Skeggs’ (1997, 2004) work examining the inequalities and subjectivities which consti-
tute class relationships, homelessness is both a significant manifestation of structural
inequality, and a contested cultural signifier that constitutes relations of authority and
motivates practices of both identification and disidentification on the part of ‘the home-
less’ themselves (Snow and Anderson, 1993).
Following Lather’s (2004) critique of the epistemological narrowing ensuing from the
pragmatic demands of neoliberal governmentality, the resources for a more ‘unruly’
approach to homelessness research can be found in a scattered, interdisciplinary litera-
ture that has emerged peripheral to the orthodoxy in homelessness research. This research
provides what May, Cloke and Johnson (2007) have called ‘alternative cartographies of
homelessness’. While epistemologically and methodologically heterogeneous, these
alternative cartographies are united in their rejection of normative distinctions between
‘the homeless’ and ‘everyone else’, and in doing so situate homelessness within the
social and cultural dynamics obscured by the reified variables of risk factor analysis. In
one sense, the task taken up here is to make homelessness ordinary, moving from the view
of homelessness as an extraordinary malfunction to a position embedded within the
wider dynamics of contemporary inequality. In another sense, the task is to show how
the extraordinary aspects of homelessness are themselves produced by practices of gov-
ernment that enact normative distinctions between ‘the homeless’ and ‘everyone else’.
What is thereby made extraordinary is the relations of power and privilege that operate
as taken for granted within hegemonic homelessness research.
In this vein, homelessness within advanced capitalist nations may be understood within
changing urban economies and modes of governance, a task taken up by Dear and Wolch
(1987), Wagner (1993) and Wright (1997). Such accounts situate homelessness in relation
to the rebranding of urban centres as neoliberally governed service economies following
deindustrialisation. In a world economy dominated by transnational networks of ‘global
cities’ (Sassen, 2012), cities and nation states have competed to attract capital investment
through the provision of precarious ‘flexible’ labour markets and financial and tax incen-
tives to investment. Simultaneously, the commodification and securitisation of both pub-
lic and privately owned housing has been central to the private provision of international
credit and thereby to the most recent global financial crisis, and responses to this crisis
have accelerated the marketisation of social housing (Kennett et al., 2013). In the USA,
the UK and Australia this has resulted in declining and increasingly privatised social
housing stocks, and the spatial landscape of cities has changed to reflect new disparities
of wealth and poverty (see also Dillabough and Kennelly, 2010; Kennelly and Watt, 2011).
Homelessness and the increasingly ghettoised poverty also discussed by Wacquant (2007)
emerges here at the nexus of labour market insecurity, housing scarcity and welfare ben-
efit inadequacy (Carlen, 1996), becoming one of the many abject spaces within the global
market economy. Meanwhile processes of gentrification and rebranding of public space as
spaces of consumption create distinctions between what Snow and Mulcahy (2001) have
called ‘prime’ and ‘marginal’ urban space, necessitating new forms of social control.
As Dean (1998) has argued, the project of governance through the mobilisation of
entrepreneurial, value creating, individualised subjectivities (Skeggs, 2011), also creates

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Farrugia and Gerrard 279

populations who become constituted as unruly, disordered and valueless. Writing in the
UK, Flint (2003, 2004) shows how the marketisation and privatisation of social housing,
as well as the renewed cultural status of homeownership, reflect this cultural politics.
The selling off and privatisation of social housing has in the UK been accompanied by a
valorisation of homeownership as a symbol of productivity and personal responsibility,
a process that Flint positions as central to the neoliberal governance of inequality. As
tenants are encouraged to become increasingly entrepreneurial in their consumption of
public housing, homeless populations are constructed as moral failures, unruly, feckless
and dangerous. Therapeutic interventions are carried out alongside increasingly punitive
public order provisions designed literally to eradicate those experiencing homelessness
from public space, criminalising practices such as begging, sleeping or urinating in pub-
lic places or loitering in spaces of consumption (Mitchell, 1997; Snow and Mulcahy,
2001). Those experiencing homelessness may thereby become treated as objects in pub-
lic space, subject to harassment, violence and abuse (Farrugia, 2011a). Responding to
these measures, Ruddick (1996) documents the tactics of homeless youth in negotiating
public spaces in which to live and socialise. Squatting in abandoned buildings and tem-
porarily occupying parks and other public spaces, these young people use spatial mobili-
ties to evade police and construct oppositional identities outside of the competitive
individualism enshrined in contemporary housing policy.
These are the social and cultural dynamics within which homeless subjectivities are
mobilised. Gowan (2010) and McNaughton (2008) situate homeless identity and agency
within broader processes of social change characterised by increasing inequality and
precarity. Focusing on the personal consequences of precarity McNaughton (2008)
describes widespread ‘edgework’ practices across social classes designed to gain an indi-
vidualised control over the self in conditions of material insecurity. For those experienc-
ing homelessness, practices such as drug use exemplify such edgework, designed to
accomplish personal autonomy in the context of disempowerment and stigmatisation. In
this sense, homeless subjectivities participate in wider changes in the material conditions
through which contemporary subjectivities emerge. Gowan (2010) describes the diverse
subjectivities of men experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, demonstrating how
the identities and ethical norms of groups such as street drug dealers and full time home-
less recyclers reflect the centrality of work and material survival. Focusing on homeless
recyclers, Gowan describes modes of working-class masculinity that have become chal-
lenged within the globalised service economy. In the valorisation of hard work and pro-
ductive labour by homeless recyclers, Gowan finds ‘mainstream’ moral imperatives that
continue as resources for self-worth, while homeless drug dealers’ emphasis on cunning
and ‘street smarts’ are ways of navigating and controlling the urban spaces within which
they live and work.
However, as Skeggs (2011) argues, it is important to focus on the ongoing processes
of relationality that provide meaning outside the reflexive value-accruing practices val-
orised by neoliberalism. In this context, both Farrugia (2011b) and Gowan (2010) dem-
onstrate the importance of relationships and collective identities for the survival and
existential moral worth of the roofless. Wright (1997) theorises the mobilisation of col-
lective identities among the homeless for political ends, describing political coalitions
between activist organisations and those experiencing homelessness in response to

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280 Sociology 50(2)

‘urban renewal’ reform. However, these relationships are also inflected with the politics
of race, sexuality, gender and class. For example, Watson (2011) shows how the personal
desires and intimate relationships of young women experiencing homelessness may be
premised on the commodification of their bodies as resources, which may result in
increased vulnerability to violence and sexual assault. The patriarchal nature of street life
has also been documented by Wardhaugh (1996, 1999) who describes the strategic invis-
ibility of ‘unaccommodated women’ in terms of the gendered politics of public space.
Relationships are also influenced by the stigmatisation of homelessness, with partici-
pants in Farrugia (2011b) avoiding other shelter residents in order to create distance from
the moral failure they represent. Issues of relationality and affect are also highlighted in
the work of Catherine Robinson. Robinson (2011) muddies the research focus on the
object of homelessness, as she asks researchers to reflect on how both they, and their
participants, come ‘to know’ and ‘feel’ homelessness.
While this scattered literature is methodologically and epistemologically heterogene-
ous, it shares a concern to problematise the objectification of people experiencing home-
lessness within research and policy. From different standpoints, this collection of
literature aims to interrogate critically the inequalities and modes of governance that
constitute contemporary poverty. Rather than enacting divisions between ‘the homeless’
and ‘the mainstream’, these approaches analyse how social processes, policy imperatives
and research agendas can produce and obscure normative distinctions between ‘success-
ful’ and ‘failed’ subjects (see also Gerrard and Farrugia, 2014). In this sense, these narra-
tives provide the resources for an alternative intellectual politics which responds to the
objectifications enacted in the ‘orthodoxy’ of the homelessness research with a renewed
focus on the experiences, understandings, subjectivities and activities of those who are
homeless, within a consideration of the construction of a neoliberal ‘good life’. The lan-
guage of ‘homelessness’ is therefore not abandoned, but analysed in terms of the struc-
tural inequalities and subjectivities it describes, the normative distinctions it enacts and
the different modes of intellectual politics through which it becomes visible. Borrowing
and extending from the traditions of critical feminist and post-colonial sociology, this
‘unruly’ research position, aims to unsettle the objectifying lens so often applied to those
whom academics take as their research objects.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.

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David Farrugia is Lecturer in Youth Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His
research interests focus on contemporary youth inequalities, including youth homelessness. David
is currently completing a monograph titled ‘Youth Homelessness in Late Modernity’ to be pub-
lished by Springer.
Jessica Gerrard is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne,
Australia. Her research interests focus on inequality and the relationship of education to social
change and politics. She is currently researching the practices of learning and labour for people
who are homeless, focusing in particular on the work created by homeless street press. Her recent
monograph – Radical Childhoods: Schooling and the Struggle for Social Change – was published
by Manchester University Press (2014).

Date submitted February 2014

Date accepted November 2014

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