Suchergebnisse

'Tom Hall combines street-level research with academic study to reveal the true scale and nature of the problem of hidden homelessness in contemporary Britain.' Nick Davies, author of Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth about Hidden Britain'Tom Hall writes with deep insight and a spare elegance. In the best realist tradition, he shows us the lives of homeless young people in an entirely fresh way. The reader, having been drawn into the creativity and despair of those lives, is left wondering if their problems are just those of a transitional phase, 'youth', or rather mark them for futures of permanent social exclusion.' Keith Hart, University of AberdeenIf the supposedly disaffected young provide the sub-text to so many of our social anxieties, then the young homeless loom larger here than most: our most vivid reminder of social exclusion, and exemplars too of what the tabloid press like to describe as the feckless, wilful poor. This book explores what life is really like for Britain's young homeless: estranged from their families, out of work and making do on the fringes of social security. The result is a vivid portrait of a pressing social problem. Based on extended fieldwork study - the author spent twelve months in the company of young people moving between hostel accommodation, rented bed-sit tenancies and episodes of rooflessness - Better Times Than This is Britain's first full ethnographic study of youth homelessness

This article is concerned with movement and terrain and with the ways in which qualitative inquiry might engage with and combine these in local studies of people and places. Movement is at a premium today — no shortage of social and cultural commentators insist on it — and bids fair to provide the social sciences with a new conceptual paradigm. Mobile actors abound and what were once spaces of place are now reckoned spaces of flows; space itself, emancipated from territory, becomes mobile and is deployed as a capacity. Qualitative research, having always allowed its actors to deploy a richer and more fluid world, is well placed to respond — but for one significant snag. The article sets the question: What happens to the qualitative commitment to the local, to grounded research and fieldwork, now that processes of mobility are said to transcend setting and location? Rather than look to ways in which to extend the reach of the qualitative researcher — across space, between places — the article considers how qualitative research, while remaining local, might nonetheless be brought together with movement. Two first-hand empirical examples of local qualitative inquiries directed to movement (as object and method) are used to develop this line of argument. A focus on pedestrian movement in particular aligns the article with widening inter-disciplinary and methodological interest in walking practices.

This article considers the idea of the 'free' gift, in particular relation to begging and the receipt of social security benefit and in reference to ethnographic research with the homeless in London and the South East of England. The article draws attention to the potential for both 'dole money' and spare change to signify, socially, in ways which wound. This is to recognise the Maussian connotations and moral framing to contemporary exchanges which mark out people as poor, even where the intention might be to give freely.