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Writing on the Margins from the Center: Homeless Youth + Politics at the Borders

Tierney, W. G., Hallett, R. E. — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:52:35 PST

Research with homeless youth requires negotiating with Institutional Review Boards (IRB), school districts, and social service agencies. Youth that are homeless live a life different from the researcher, thus issues of trust and caring need to be considered before asking a vulnerable young person to share his or her story. The authors share insight learned from a qualitative study of the educational barriers of homeless youth that highlight these issues. The overarching finding is that homeless youth are invisible and silenced in a social service system overwhelmed with red tape and bureaucratic procedures. The authors suggest that program developers, researchers, and policymakers give voice to homeless youth by listening to the stories they tell and then enacting policies that build on their recommendations.

Critical Homelessness: Expanding Narratives of Inclusive Democracy

Finley, S., Diversi, M. — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:02:57 PST

December 2000, Street Roots

Tafari, J. — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:02:57 PST

"Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothin' Left To Lose": The Power of Poetry for Young, Nomadic Women of the Streets

Finley, S. — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:02:56 PST

This article presents a street educator’s experience of a poetry cooperative with female street youths as an example of performance pedagogy. Poetic voices of members of the cooperative are used to illustrate the pages of this special issue of CSCM in the text of this article and as they are scattered through the pagesof this special issue like graffiti on tunnel walls. In a coda to the article, the poetry collaborative is shown to be the catalyst for At Home At School (AHAS), a larger, ongoing performance pedagogy curriculum in use with homeless children and youths.

This Is home, or Is It? Disrupting Grand Narratives of Home as Physical or Institutional Space

Moreira, C. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:26 PDT

In this article, as suggest by the subtitle, I try to expose a kind of hidden homelessness. One that is not worse than others but important to bring to light. One where narratives are missing. One that goes against the essentializing of home as a middle-class heterosexual construction while not negating the desire for a home by the ones that have none. This is a textual performance about the idea of linking traditional notions of home with how academic knowledge is constructed about the homeless—by disrupting grand narratives of home as physical or institutional space. It is a decolonizing performance autoethnography exposing homelessness that returns its gaze into the process of knowledge production in the hope that by reflecting on how knowledge is produced, troubling the Western concept of home, we academics may create narratives that help more people feel housed.

Making a Living: The Gringo Ethnographer as Pimp of the Suffering in the Late Capitalist Night

Veissiere, S. P. L. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:26 PDT

Set in the criminalized, racialized, and sexualized streets of Salvador da Bahia, this article presents experimental ethnographic glimpses of the deeply transnational aspects of desire, suffering, and violence in the disintegrating public spaces of a Northeastern Brazilian city famous for its global tourism fuelled by transnational desire for and consumption of Afro-Brazilian culture and bodies. The author reflects on the possibility of critical engagement between academic ethnographers from the North and the sex workers, street kids, crack users, and other marginalized social actors who make a living in the street. Refraining from facile, depoliticized celebrations of grassroots "critical" anthropology and other fantasies about empowering the subaltern, the author depicts the terror-as-usual at Bahian-street livelihoods from the necessarily exploitative position of a gringo ethnographer who is also making a living and a career from writing about the suffering of others. While this article, like all of Veissière’s work, is ultimately committed to a search for postcolonial social justice and critical dialogues between intellectuals and the subaltern, it also contemplates the horror of being an academic pimp who sustains a livelihood from exploiting human suffering and violence.

Abused

., C. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:25 PDT

Hurting Lovers

., C. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:25 PDT

Between the Wizard and the Deep Blue Sea: Notes on Homeless Youth Advocacy and Community Coalition Building

Woolworth, S. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:24 PDT

This article features a series of short self-reflective narrative vignettes about the experiences that led me to build and ultimately lead a coalition of homeless youth advocates who began the challenging work of calling attention to the plight of homeless teenagers in a mid-size industrial Pacific Northwest city concerned primarily with providing for and controlling its chronic adult homeless population. In the essay I draw from personal memory, social policy history and data from a participatory action research project to shed light on both the institutional politics of homeless youth policy and the varied possibilities of sustained grassroots community advocacy.

Florida Afternoon

., K. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:24 PDT

Lost in Translation

Hecht, T. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:24 PDT

Kia's Song

., K. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:24 PDT

Poverty Pimps in the Academy: A Dialogue About Subjectivity, Reflexivity, and Power in Decolonizing Production of Knowledge

Diversi, M., Finley, S. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:24 PDT

The authors often talk about the moral and ethical predicaments they experience working with marginalized populations. But such conversations, confessions, and verbalized doubts happened in intimate settings, often with out office doors closed or when the hallways are quiet and empty. This is not a whisper of secrecy or conspiracy but one of self-reflexive contemplation about the privilege differential between the authors and the humans they encounter in the streets as they conduct action research or simple walk around as citizen observers. Through this dialogue, the authors attempt to capture some of the conversations they have had about the unspoken internal conflict faced by the scholars, including the authors, doing forms of action research with fellow humans who continue to suffer under the self-righteous ideologies of justified domination. The central force behind this dialogical article is not to offer solutions but to problematize the lack of narrative space and language for the colonialist reenactments every poverty scholar have to live with, even as they aim at decolonizing and empowering scholarship. The authors hope this dialogue is evocative enough to invite others to further explore similar dilemmas of decolonizing scholarship.

Poison Pen Letters to My Sisters

Finley, M. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:23 PDT

Searching for the Pink Fortress: Correspondence About Street Life

., T. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:23 PDT

Creature Comforts

., A. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:23 PDT

Issues of Power in Collaborative Research With Dignity Village

Mosher, H. I. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:34:22 PDT

In this article, the author will utilize her fieldnotes and videotaped interviews to reconstruct and reflect on her experiences and some of the ethical dilemmas she faced as a community partner in participatory action research with a self-governed homeless encampment called Dignity Village. The author’s yearlong facilitation utilized a democratic, collaborative, and inclusive process. Following the final stages of the research, an abrupt shift of power occurred in the community. She explores questions about her involvement in this power shift and whether the change was problematic or healthy for the community.

"After Bush"

Denzin, N. K. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:46:04 PDT

A short performance text interrogates the Bush Legacy in American politics.

Erratum

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:44:03 PDT

A People's Method(ology): A Dialogical Approach

Barnard, S. R., Van Gerven, J. P. — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:47:00 PDT

This is a critical dialogue between graduate student and activists in the discipline of sociology. Critical approaches to the essential question of critical race studies are discussed and evaluated in terms of their ability to develop a theory and praxis for changing the structural and cultural inequalities that constitute the enduring legacy of the colonial project and slavery. Conventional sociological methodologies as well as combative epistemologies and pedagogies, suffer from an inability to inform and be informed by real world movements for social justice and thus are limited in their applicability beyond the ivory tower. Through a Freirean critical dialogue the possibility for a human method of mobilization emerges that has the potential for aiding with the liberation struggles of all oppressed peoples. The authors hope that this dialogue will be taken up by other peoples in other places to further their quest for social justice.

Narrative and the Re/Production of Transsexual: The Foreclosure of an Endured Emergence of Gender Multiplicity

Kaufmann, J. — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:40:02 PST

In some autobiographical narratives, transsexual has been narrated outside the gender binary. These narratives have the propensity to reconceptualize multiplicity of genders. However, the re/production of transsexual appears not only to be a function of how the position is represented but also a function of the structure of narrative. If this is so, then the following questions arise: What is the relation between the representation of a subject position in a narrative and the structure of narrative? How does this relation function in the re/production of transsexual and gender multiplicity? In an analysis of one autobiographical interview, I read male-to-female transsexual as a subject position grounded in dichotomous gender was disrupted only where ambiguity is allowed in the narrative structure, and this disruption was foreclosed through how the subject was represented and/or the structure of the narrative.