Embodying plurality

Becoming more‐than‐homeless

Bibliographic Data

ID8964096
AuthorsJosie Jolley (0000-0002-8546-4861, Department of Geography University of Sussex Brighton UK, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume45
Issue3
Pages635-648
Publication date2020-01-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/tran.12373
OpenAlexW3004056548
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited62

Arising from seven months of auto/ethnographic research in an English city, this paper attends to the mundane practices through which we – “the homeless” – renegotiate ourselves to become more‐than‐homeless. The “we” through which these auto/biographies are writ denotes an inflection on the spectral presence of my own experiences of homelessness, spectral because they reflect a historic occurrence brought back in the doing of this research. Affording a unique position of betweenness, this paper thus seeks to add depth and nuance to the homeless literature by emphasising the embodied performances through which we become more‐than‐homeless. To this end, this paper contributes to recent approaches in homelessness research drawing on performativity and embodiment to show how we are neither ontologically nor existentially reducible to our homelessness. Exploring the webs of relational engagements between human and non‐human others, space and subjectivity, the ongoing (re)negotiations expressed in acts of remembering, forgetting, suppressing, misremembering, and imagining, distance the moment of homelessness so that we are able to become someone other than “homeless.” This distancing is not to shade the ways in which we are different. Rather, it is to reveal a dimension of possibilities, both spatial and temporal, through which we resist a subsumption into the singular mass of “the homeless,” becoming instead someone more‐than‐homeless

Aesthetics · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 · Distancing · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Ethnography · Linguistics · Performative utterance · Performativity · Political science · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Subjectivity · Writ · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Urban Planning and Governance

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access