Examine the argument that Identities of place can be a Source of Inclusion and Exclusion.

20; Levi, Rosenthal & Bailey 2013, 241). In the case of the Edgewater homeless, this photo ethnography urges the reader to move beyond base simplistic assumptions and stigma surrounding the community and move towards a greater understand of how large coercive constraints interact with intimate behaviour, and how this contributes to, and continue to contribute to, the Edgewater homeless circumstances and suffering (Bourgois & Schonberg 2009, p.20). Bourgois and Schonberg (2009, pp. 20, 318) state that the Edgewater Boulevard is home to the social pariahs who have hit rock bottom, fleeing and expelled from family, the labour force and government services, and all the while blaming themselves for their fate. It is the gray zone that justifies this self-condemnation and where interpersonal violence and betrayal can fester, playing out between loved ones or themselves (Bourgois & Schonberg 2009, p. 318). Bourgois and Schonberg (2009, p. 318) state that it is this everyday spectacle of gray zone behaviour that obscures impact of long-term social forces and legitimizes purposefully hostile or dysfunctional government policies towards the poor.

In “Salvaging the Self from Homelessness”, David Snow and Leon Anderson argue that while people living on the streets have an obvious social or role identity, they sometimes struggle to find their personal identities. A social identity is an identity given to someone by society. If a person sees someone else living on the street, they will most likely be identified as homeless. A personal identity is an identity people assign to themselves to give meaning to who they are. Snow and Anderson continue by studying how homeless people attempt to create a personal identity. They come up with three general ways, distancing, embracement, and fictive storytelling. Distancing simply means trying to avoid actions, places, and people who relate

Throughout this paper I will be discussing the issue of homelessness and how it is steadily becoming a more serious problem as time progresses. I will discuss issues that surround homelessness such as the NIMBY, not in my backyard, issue and how it is causing the homeless to not receive the help that they need. This is an issue that needs to change, but due to NIMBYism, it is very difficult create such change.

Chapter 1, “Intimate Apartheid”, introduces one to the group of homeless people living on Edgewater Blvd. It dives into the racialized micro-geography of homeless encampments and how segregation plays a key role within the lumpen. However, the authors do reveal moments where the racial hierarchy is trumped by the “moral economy” of street life.

Currently, people within our society are predominantly divided by the groups they identify with or with how they are identified by others. These identities are defined by our social location. Social location includes our gender, race, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, and religion (Hutchison, 2011). In this paper, I will take a close look at my social location and attempt to describe how it affects my way of living and my professional life.

Quindlen assumes that her audience buys into the cliché of “home is where the heart is,” and believes that homeless people are different than people with homes. The author’s assumptions are reasonable because the idea of homeless that Quindlen is battling, is the version portrayed through the media. When Quindlen included the idea that home is a feeling, she specifically addressed an assumption that undermined her views.

Homelessness is a growing epidemic across the country. This terrible misfortune has led to many unsuspecting people leading impoverished lifestyles, and facing the horrific and heart-wrenching tragedy of abandonment. The purpose of this essay is to not only persuade the readers to get involved in ending homelessness on local and national efforts, but to embrace new and creative ways of helping to end this rapidly growing problem, by taking action to end this catastrophic situation. Also, I will demonstrate the causes and effects of the homeless resorting to violence, by using comparison and contrast to examine the views and standpoints on helping the forgotten, so that we might end this calamity once and for all. In an increasingly

2) A sociologist’s study of homeless men on New York’s Sixth Avenue involves hanging out with the

Social location, or the status in life that people have because of their place in a society, have a huge impact on everyone. The impact that social location created could be neutral, but most of the time it will have a positive or negative impact on people. For example, an African American could be discriminated because of his ethnicity, or a patient will choose an older doctor when he needs a treatment. Different social location that we have will affect our decisions in everyday life, and most of the time it happened subconsciously, which means we don’t realize that the decisions we make are based on our social location. Like everyone else, I was affected by my own social location, both positively and negatively.

Homelessness is a critical issue that requires everyone’s attention. Hundreds of thousands of homeless people live on the streets as their shelter. Historically, homelessness has always been a problem in society. Homeless people were known as “the wondering poor”, “sturdy beggars”, and as “vagrants,” but it was not until the late 18th century that homelessness because noticeable to society. Homeless person is anyone who lacks adequate shelter, resources, and community ties. People who are homeless can be categorized as chronic deinstitutionalized or temporary

Many of the families in Kozol’s book live in central Manhattan in drug-infested buildings, falling apart from the brick in, whereas in earlier periods of New York’s history were fine hotels. One of such buildings is the Martinique Hotel, where Kozol afforded much of his time to the families that dwelled there, as referenced in his book. Those who inhabit the Martinique Hotel are symbolically affected by New York’s renown valor in their conscious, further placing them in the class as “less-fortunate” within a city that does not afford them many opportunities. Many homeless neighborhoods find themselves victim to substandard medical and education facilities. The families, as Kozol describes were shipped by the masses to communities that already suffer from the city’s highest rates of HIV, drug addiction, pediatric asthma and psychiatric illness (Kozol 11). There is the idea, as Kozol says, that the homes that these families find themselves in are “closed systems”, “where rules of normal law and normal governance did not apply” (Kozol 8), whereas the people are detached from the rest of society, confined to the community all in itself. The families he works with are sectioned off by society because they live in poor areas and confined within a capitalistic economy, have nowhere to go. In a way, Kozol describes these areas as the capital of homeless people, surrounded by a city built for the wealthy, by

Homelessness is a social crisis that has stayed with us throughout our history. There was an increase in the number of homeless people in the 1980s due to housing and social service cuts increasing. In Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg’s, “Righteous Dopefiend,” being homeless is just one of the many problems that encompass their day to day reality. The two anthropologists assimilate themselves in the homeless community and observe the hardships that come from living on the streets and drug addiction. A better understanding is attained through their ethnographic research and details of the homeless’ lives can be used to further our knowledge and help in solving society’s problems. This ethnography shows

In his book Elijah Anderson tries to describe how life is, living in a black poor community in an American town known as Inner-city. In this area everyone is struggling financially and seem distant from the rest of America. The main social class in this town is the “decent” and the “street” families as the community has labeled them. The labeling by the local is as a result of social contest between the inhabitants. The line between a decent and street family is usually very thin, it’s based on a family evaluation of itself labeling itself decent and the other street. The irony is that families bearing a street label may value itself as decent and still valuing other families’ street. However, this labels form the basis of understanding inner-city community lifestyle. The community has many of the white society middle class values but they know the values don’t hold water in the street. They say it does not provide the attitude of a person who can take care of themselves in the street.

The homeless and addicts have been stratified to the bottom of the social ladder. They are thought to be deviants therefore as a society we are taught to ignore and despise them and disregard their needs. Bourgeois and Schonberg’s 10-year study, Righteous Dopefiend, follows the lives of heroin addicted homeless folk living on Edgewater Boulevard. The Edgewater homeless recognize that those with economic capital have a responsibility in caring for their needs thus they embrace their worthiness in society. As a result of this they label themselves as “righteous dopefiends” (2009, p. 5). Bourgeois and Schonberg show how structural violence has affected the Edgewater homeless, such as self-blame, lack of access to quality medical care and what

The researchers describe their feelings over entering the Moral Economy of the Edgewater homeless, frustration over the frequent hustling and worried about the implications of power and the possibility of distorting the relationships with their participants, but they also recognised that in order to understand the Edgewater homeless they needed to participate in the moral economy, as this defined the boundaries of the community and included them (Bourgois & Schonberg 2009, p. 6). There were many examples of the researcher’s participation in the moral economy, especially between Jeff, Carter and Tina. There were times that Jeff did not participate well, in the case where he initially refused a ‘gift’ of a stolen t-shirt from Carter and Tina,