In the Absence of Home: Understanding Homelessness

Abstract

A burgeoning of research into homelessness throughout the 1990s (encapsulated in a comprehensive UK summary, Fitzpatrick et al, 2000) and increasingly sophisticated academic analysis (in edited collections by Hutson & Clapham, 1999; Burrows, Pleace & Quilgars, 1997; and Kennett & Marsh, 1999 for example) has led to a body of academic work constituting ‘homelessness studies’.

The dance on the periphery may not be leading anywhere, but at least it celebrates a refusal to sleep; a resistance to arrest; a mode of motion turns out to be a way, perhaps the only way, of life.

(Cohen & Taylor, 1992:236)