Checkerboard Square
Regular price
€192.20
A01=David Wagner
Active AA
alternative homeless community organization
Author_David Wagner
authoritarian families
bureaucratic social welfare system
Category=JHB
Checkerboard Square
Checkerboard Square community
Dense
Dense Friendship Networks
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographic research
Family Ethic
Friendly Center
Good Life
Graying Man
Hill Song
Indigenous Social Movements
Longer Term Homeless People
North City
poverty studies
Prior Living Arrangements
public social welfare
Shelter System
Social Club Group
social exclusion
SSI Benefit
street culture
Street Kids
Street People
Street Person
street-level communities
Tent City
urban sociology
welfare system critique
Wing Nuts
Work Force Participation
Young Men
Young Turks
Product details
- ISBN 9780367004781
- Weight: 550g
- Dimensions: 143 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 22 Jul 2019
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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During the past decade, homelessness became a widespread phenomenon in the United States for the first time since the Great Depression. The public frequently blamed the poor for their plight. Journalistic and academic accounts, in contrast, often evoked pathos and pity, regarding the homeless primarily as objects of treatment and rehabilitation. David Wagner challenges both of these dominant images, offering an ethnographic portrait of the poor that reveals their struggle not only to survive but also to create communities on the streets and to develop social movements on their own behalf. Definitely not passive victims, the homeless of Checkerboard Square survive within an alternative street culture, with its own norms and social organization, in a world often hidden from the view of researchers, journalists, and social workers. Checkerboard Square reveals the daily struggle of street people to organize their lives in the face of rejection by employers, government, landlords, and even their own families. Looking beyond the well-documented causes of homelessness such as lack of affordable housing or unemployment, Wagner shows how the poor often become homeless through resistance to the discipline of the workplace, authoritarian families, and the bureaucratic social welfare system. He explains why the crisis of homelessness is not only about the lack of services, housing, and jobs but a result of the very structure of the dominant institutions of work, family, and public social welfare.
