Abstract
This chapter focuses on the first-person perspective of an 18-year-old homeless young woman as expressed through her travelogues, which she created while walking, hitchhiking, and riding the rails across the United States during the 2 years she participated in the Youth Trek study. Youth Trek was a transdisciplinary, longitudinal study which used mobile phones to maintain contact with homeless young people as they traveled, collaborating with them to document their lives. Using her smartphone and a point-and-shoot camera, one participant, called Hero, helped sketch out her travel routes by contributing GPS coordinates, uploading 549 documentary photographs to the research site, recording geo-narratives about her travel experiences, and cowriting photo essays with the researcher. Through travelogues, Hero documented landscapes she witnessed passing through rural and urban settings from the Northwest to the Southeast. She described ways she used the camera: to create self-portraits and selfies during joyful and trying times; document a mood, feeling, or ephemeral scene; and capture a love affair in motion and a crush that never reaches fruition. She utilized the camera as a tool of admiration, photographing her dog, street art, and public art of heroic proportions. In her photo essays, she explains how she creates and finds community through art and uses the camera to make a visual record of her environment documenting her dwellings and squats, train-hopping experiences, pollution, and beauty. These travelogues cannot characterize the experiences of all traveling homeless youth, but they do offer insight into the unique perspective of one.
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Acknowledgements
Foremost thanks go to “Hero” and the other dedicated and insightful Youth Trek study participants. The study design was informed by Co-Investigator Nicolas Sheon, Ph.D., Marjorie J. Robertson, Ph.D., and E. Cristin O’Keeffe, J.D. and evolved conceptually from work with Jean Scandlyn, Ph.D. For assistance with recruitment, gratitude goes to Mary Howe and the Homeless Youth Alliance, San Francisco.
Research was carried out at the University of California, San Francisco, first at the Institute for Health and Aging, with the support of Co-Directors Wendy Max, Ph.D. and Pat Fox, Ph.D., and later, at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF, with support of Director, Claire Brindis, Dr. PH., and Patrick Henderson. Grant support came from a National Institutes of Health (Number UL1 RR024131).
For geographical consulting and assistance with mapping, thanks go to Maggie Kelly, Ph.D., and Kevin Koy, M.A. at the Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF), UC Berkeley. For assistance related to photography, thanks go to Miguel Farias (for formatting), Andrea Taylor, Steve Mack, Mike Josepher, Ian Frost, Kate Murphy, Carol Queen, and Carol Leigh.
As a Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Department of International Development where most of the writing took place, great feedback was given by Gina Crivello Ph.D., Jo Boyden, Ph.D., and Virginia Morrow, Ph.D. For their multiple reviews, and extensive editing assistance, William Donovan, M.D., Patricia Donovan, Ph.D., Andrea Papanastassiou, M.A., and Nancy Worth, Ph.D. are thanked.
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DonovanBlondell, A. (2016). Trekking, Navigating, and Travelogueing in the Youth Trek Project: The Documentary Photography and Photo Essays of a Young Research Collaborator Traveling in the United States. In: Worth, N., Dwyer, C. (eds) Identities and Subjectivities. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 4. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-023-0_27
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