CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2010
| Author | Herring, Christopher John |
|---|---|
| Title | Punitive Containment and Contesting Neoliberalism: The Roots and Implications of Homeless Camps in America |
| Summary | This paper seeks to resituate and explain the growing homeless camp phenomena that emerged in the late „90s in the US to the broader, more insidious, though incomplete neoliberalization processes occurring in its current role-out phase. The first part of the paper deconstructs the media flurry and presentation of tent cities during the spring of 2009 through an empirical survey of the variegated communities across the Pacific Coast. While these communities display an ad hoc collage of policy fixes and forms of homeless habitation, their concurrent rise and reactive similarities are clearly linked to specific mechanisms of localized neoliberalism; restructuring of the welfare state, mutations in local bureaucracies of economic development and an increasingly punitive approach towards managing the poor. I argue that we cannot simply conceptualize this form of informal urbanism as a natural response to an unmet housing demand, but rather that it must be explained in contrast to more traditional forms of homeless habitation such as shelters and isolated camping, as reactions to the shifts within welfare management and discourse, increasing symbolic and physical violence perpetuated against homeless people, and the pervasive criminalization of poverty. I conclude conceptualizing these settlements as the punitive containment of marginality, but at the same time as challenges to an increasingly vengeful form of social exclusion within American urbanization. |
| Supervisor | Bodnar, Judit |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/herring_christopher.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University