Craig Willse
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816693474
- eISBN:
- 9781452952505
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693474.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Ethical Issues and Debates
It is an easy assumption that social service programs and social scientific studies respond to homelessness after the fact, attempting to understand and prevent it. This book, however, argues that ...
More
It is an easy assumption that social service programs and social scientific studies respond to homelessness after the fact, attempting to understand and prevent it. This book, however, argues that homelessness is an effect of social services and sciences, which shape not only what counts as homelessness, but also what will be done about it. Drawing from many years of work experience in homeless advocacy and activist settings, as well as interviews conducted with program managers, counselors, and staff at homeless services organizations in New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, and Seattle, this book offers the first analysis of how housing insecurity becomes organized as a legible, governable social problem. The past twenty-five years have witnessed a significant conceptual shift; whereas earlier social science and service discourse focused on individual pathologies as the locus for intervention, today a homeless population has replaced the individual as the primary object of knowledge and governance. In the realm of population management, how to most efficiently allocate resources to manage ongoing insecurity becomes the goal, rather than the eradication of the social, economic, and political bases of housing needs. Putting the work of Michel Foucault on biopower in dialogue with Marxist accounts of neoliberalism and critical race and ethnic studies analyses of the racial state and racial capitalism, the book argues that homelessness today constitutes a form of “surplus life,” populations made redundant as labor but valuable as a problem to be known and managed.Less
It is an easy assumption that social service programs and social scientific studies respond to homelessness after the fact, attempting to understand and prevent it. This book, however, argues that homelessness is an effect of social services and sciences, which shape not only what counts as homelessness, but also what will be done about it. Drawing from many years of work experience in homeless advocacy and activist settings, as well as interviews conducted with program managers, counselors, and staff at homeless services organizations in New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, and Seattle, this book offers the first analysis of how housing insecurity becomes organized as a legible, governable social problem. The past twenty-five years have witnessed a significant conceptual shift; whereas earlier social science and service discourse focused on individual pathologies as the locus for intervention, today a homeless population has replaced the individual as the primary object of knowledge and governance. In the realm of population management, how to most efficiently allocate resources to manage ongoing insecurity becomes the goal, rather than the eradication of the social, economic, and political bases of housing needs. Putting the work of Michel Foucault on biopower in dialogue with Marxist accounts of neoliberalism and critical race and ethnic studies analyses of the racial state and racial capitalism, the book argues that homelessness today constitutes a form of “surplus life,” populations made redundant as labor but valuable as a problem to be known and managed.
Craig Willse
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816693474
- eISBN:
- 9781452952505
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693474.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Ethical Issues and Debates
Drawing from critical histories of the social sciences, Chapter Two addresses the role of sociology in governing homeless populations. The chapter argues that homelessness has served a ...
More
Drawing from critical histories of the social sciences, Chapter Two addresses the role of sociology in governing homeless populations. The chapter argues that homelessness has served a discipline-building function in sociology, a place to test out and perfect new methodological approaches. The chapter argues that these discipline-building encounters with homelessness ultimately produce an image of sociology as a form of white, properly gendered, and ethical labor.Less
Drawing from critical histories of the social sciences, Chapter Two addresses the role of sociology in governing homeless populations. The chapter argues that homelessness has served a discipline-building function in sociology, a place to test out and perfect new methodological approaches. The chapter argues that these discipline-building encounters with homelessness ultimately produce an image of sociology as a form of white, properly gendered, and ethical labor.
Craig Willse
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816693474
- eISBN:
- 9781452952505
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693474.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Ethical Issues and Debates
Chapter One offers a theoretical framework for understanding relationships between capital, racialized subordination, and housing needs. It argues that housing insecurity must be reframed in terms of ...
More
Chapter One offers a theoretical framework for understanding relationships between capital, racialized subordination, and housing needs. It argues that housing insecurity must be reframed in terms of the racialized system of property rights and access in the United States. Using Foucault and Marxist accounts of labor and surplus, it shows that homelessness becomes productive in the context of knowledge and service economies as surplus waste to be managed.Less
Chapter One offers a theoretical framework for understanding relationships between capital, racialized subordination, and housing needs. It argues that housing insecurity must be reframed in terms of the racialized system of property rights and access in the United States. Using Foucault and Marxist accounts of labor and surplus, it shows that homelessness becomes productive in the context of knowledge and service economies as surplus waste to be managed.
Craig Willse
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816693474
- eISBN:
- 9781452952505
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693474.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Ethical Issues and Debates
Chapter Four looks at database requirements for HUD-funded agencies. Despite concerns of “big brother” spying, the chapter argues that the new standardized measures of services and outcomes actually ...
More
Chapter Four looks at database requirements for HUD-funded agencies. Despite concerns of “big brother” spying, the chapter argues that the new standardized measures of services and outcomes actually serve to regulate agencies more so than clients, producing a kind of domestic structural adjustment context in which agencies are “free” to innovate to survive.Less
Chapter Four looks at database requirements for HUD-funded agencies. Despite concerns of “big brother” spying, the chapter argues that the new standardized measures of services and outcomes actually serve to regulate agencies more so than clients, producing a kind of domestic structural adjustment context in which agencies are “free” to innovate to survive.
Craig Willse
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816693474
- eISBN:
- 9781452952505
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693474.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Ethical Issues and Debates
The introduction argues that conceptualizations of homelessness directly shape social responses to housing needs. Rather than an accepted category, the introduction proposes that “homelessness” must ...
More
The introduction argues that conceptualizations of homelessness directly shape social responses to housing needs. Rather than an accepted category, the introduction proposes that “homelessness” must be understand as an effect of policy and discourse which often obscure rather than alleviate racialized forms of poverty and inequality that produce housing insecurity. The introduction also proposes a method of “the diagram,” which offers models for describing power that refuse accepted boundaries of objects, knowledge formations, and locations.Less
The introduction argues that conceptualizations of homelessness directly shape social responses to housing needs. Rather than an accepted category, the introduction proposes that “homelessness” must be understand as an effect of policy and discourse which often obscure rather than alleviate racialized forms of poverty and inequality that produce housing insecurity. The introduction also proposes a method of “the diagram,” which offers models for describing power that refuse accepted boundaries of objects, knowledge formations, and locations.
Mark Storey
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199893188
- eISBN:
- 9780199332793
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199893188.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter examines some of the frequent representations of train journeys found across a variety of rural fictions. Indicative of the deeper incursions of urban capitalism into the American ...
More
This chapter examines some of the frequent representations of train journeys found across a variety of rural fictions. Indicative of the deeper incursions of urban capitalism into the American countryside, the train is considered as a herald of modernity as well as a vehicle from which postbellum Americans encountered and traversed rural landscapes in a distinctly modern way. Examples of train journeys in texts by numerous writers–including Maurice Thompson, Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, and Booth Tarkington–are read against a detailed account of how such journeys altered the travelling subject's relationship to both time and vision.Less
This chapter examines some of the frequent representations of train journeys found across a variety of rural fictions. Indicative of the deeper incursions of urban capitalism into the American countryside, the train is considered as a herald of modernity as well as a vehicle from which postbellum Americans encountered and traversed rural landscapes in a distinctly modern way. Examples of train journeys in texts by numerous writers–including Maurice Thompson, Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, and Booth Tarkington–are read against a detailed account of how such journeys altered the travelling subject's relationship to both time and vision.
