Abstract:
This thesis explores homelessness in Washington D.C. Drawing from eight
months of ethnographic fieldwork, I consider experiences of homelessness in the
changing urban space of Washington D.C., contextualizing these within the broader
forces of neoliberalism. Situating personal narratives within the social and physical
spaces in which daily life unravels, I critically analyse the denial of space and place to
people who are homeless, whose existence as homeless bodies represents stark
contradictions to normative ideals of neoliberal subjects. I draw on theories of symbolic,
structural, and everyday violence to argue that to be homeless is to exist within a category
of precarity and powerlessness in the parallel margins of society – the spaces in which
paradoxically different, concurrent lives are chartered.
