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Dreams of Mobility in the American West: Transients, Anti-Homeless Campaigns, & Shelter Services in Boulder, Colorado

Lyness, Andrew S
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1417675567

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Comparative Studies.
For people living homeless in America, even an unsheltered existence in the urban spaces most of us call “public” is becoming untenable. Thinly veiled anti-homelessness legislation is now standard urban policy across much of the United States. One clear marker of this new urbanism is that vulnerable and unsheltered people are increasingly being treated as moveable policy objects and pushed even further toward the margins of our communities. Whilst the political-economic roots of this trend are in waning localism and neoliberal polices that defined “clean up the streets” initiatives since the 1980s, the cultural roots of such governance in fact go back much further through complex historical representations of masculinity, work, race, and mobility that have continuously haunted discourses of American homelessness since the nineteenth century. A common perception in the United States is that to be homeless is to be inherently mobile. This reflects a cultural belief across the political spectrum that homeless people are attracted to places with lenient civic attitudes, good social services, or even nice weather. This is especially true in the American West where rich frontier myths link notions of homelessness with positively valued ideas of heroism, resilience, rugged masculinity, and wilderness survival. Today even formerly tolerant liberal municipalities are rationalizing aggressive anti-homelessness campaigns by connecting homelessness with mobility. In Boulder, Colorado, like many similarly sized towns in the west, there is a real population of highly visible young travelers whose presence is ubiquitous downtown during the spring and summer. In recent years these seasonal groups have become the topic of much debate in Boulder as the city struggles to reconcile its reputation as one of the nation’s most socially progressive and tolerant communities, with a public and political call to clamp down on all visible homelessness. Therefore, in order to examine the effects these mobile groups were having on attitudes towards the year-round local homeless population, I conducted seven months of fieldwork in the city during 2012 and 2013. For the purpose of this qualitative study I identified three distinct local populations, and across winter, spring and summer I worked with two of them: 1) `Travelling kids’ 2) `Homeless’ 3) Marginalized. In order to better understand the location and bureaucratic categorization of these populations, I first spent the winter volunteering in a Boulder shelter, interviewed the directors, and employed participant observation from first-hand involvement in regional “Point-in-Time” homeless counts. Subsequently I tracked changes in these populations using ethnographic data gathered on the streets of Boulder during the summer of 2013. This case study links a wider urban policy analysis with considerations of historical and contemporary representations of homelessness in the western United States. Through these connections we may better understand prevailing social attitudes towards unsheltered populations, how representations of homelessness shape urban governance, as well as the consequences of current homelessness policies on the actual people living precarious and unsheltered lives on our nation’s streets.
Leo Coleman, PhD (Advisor)
346 p.
American Studies; Comparative; Cultural Anthropology; Journalism; Sociology
homelessness media culture attitudes representation American Studies traveling mobility Boulder Colorado Western Myth homeless shelter social services urban ethnography anti-homelessness bum hobo tramp masculinity white gender Shrewsbury School

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Lyness, A. S. (2014). Dreams of Mobility in the American West: Transients, Anti-Homeless Campaigns, & Shelter Services in Boulder, Colorado [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1417675567

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Lyness, Andrew. Dreams of Mobility in the American West: Transients, Anti-Homeless Campaigns, & Shelter Services in Boulder, Colorado. 2014. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1417675567.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Lyness, Andrew. "Dreams of Mobility in the American West: Transients, Anti-Homeless Campaigns, & Shelter Services in Boulder, Colorado." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1417675567

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1417675567
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.