Date of Award

1-1-2017

Document Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Anthropology

First Advisor

Alejandro Cerón, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Dean J. Saitta

Third Advisor

Roddy MacInnes

Keywords

Denver, Homelessness, Identity, Internalization, Resistance, Women

Abstract

Following the economic crisis in 2008, the United States, and Denver in particular, saw a considerable rise in the number of people considered homeless. Despite an increase in the population, little anthropological research has been done to understand the experiences of street-embodied individuals and the services available to them. Through participant-observation, life-history interviews, and photovoice, I closely studied the lives of two women experiencing homelessness and used interpretive phenomenological analysis to analyze the data. Analyzed through Foucault's biopolitics, technologies of the self, and panopticism, as well as Goffman's presentation of the self, I make the case that the homeless experience is marked by social exclusion, which I found to be internalized and resisted in the lives of two women in a variety of ways. These findings are relevant to service providers in the homeless industry, in the way they approach their interactions with people experiencing homelessness.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Taylor L. Morrison

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

115 p.

Discipline

Cultural Anthropology

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