Dispatches from the Street

Abstract

This study examines the personal worlds of homeless campers in Tucson, Arizona in the late 1990s to discover how the homeless contend with new sociospatial strategies of control. Tucson is typical of the dozens of U.S. cities that are attempting to evict street people from urban cores that have been rediscovered as frontiers for development and capital investment. The article draws from a year-long ethnographic case study of six campers to analyze their everyday talk and placemaking as interrelated productions of meaning. The analysis shows that the campers’ meaning making was inseparable from their material struggles to survive. They used their talk and placemaking to construct alternative homes and workplaces, an alternative, self-affirming definition of homelessness, and the foundations of a critique against the “system” of institutions producing poverty and inequality. Their meaning making constituted a “weapon of the weak” which the campers deployed to wage a kind of symbolic guerrilla war against the dominant discourse on homelessness.

Keywords:

• Homelessness
• Discourse Analysis
• Ethnography
• Symbolic Struggle

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deborah N. Kaplan

Deborah N. Kaplan was Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at theUniversity ofWashington, Seattle, USA from September 2003 until November 2007, when she died unexpectedly. She had just completed a summer of fieldwork on the homeless tent city movement in the Northwestern United States