Found poetry – Finding home: A qualitative study of homeless immigrant women

Abstract

The focus of this article is on the use of found poetry as a tool in qualitative research to examine the experience of precarious housing and homelessness among immigrant women in Montreal. Immigrant and refugee women exhibit greater risk for homelessness than women in general or male newcomers due to higher rates of poverty. Yet little is known about migrant women's experiences of homelessness and less is available from their own perspective, specifically. The article provides a context for understanding female, newcomer homelessness and summarizes the history of the found poem in a variety of disciplines with an emphasis on “social work and the arts” context. This article also details the study methodology and illustrates the process of the found poem technique with two found poems used as data representation. The found poems we present in this article reveal two of the study's key findings related to causes of homelessness: unexpected crises (tipping points) and exploitation.

Keywords:

• Arts
• homelessness
• immigrant women
• poetic inquiry
• poetry therapy
• qualitative research
• social work

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by Human Resources Skill Development Canada (HRSDC) Homeless Partnering Secretariat.