Beside One's Self: Homelessness Felt and Lived

What is it to feel horneless, to be without the orienting geography of home? Beside One''s Self delivers a response to this question making equally central retrospective reexaminations of my past ethnographic and biographic fieldwork data and reexaminations of my researching body itself as an articulate and data-rich register of the felt dimension of homelessness. As such, this book does not traditionally present the findings of a single ethnographic or biographic study and is instead grounded in an experimental methodological approach that firmly places the researching body at the fieldwork scene and makes explicit the researcher's role as a research participant. Beside One's Self intervenes in the usual qualitative focus on homeless people's narratives by including the researcher's voice among those of the researched and by acknowledging and foregrounding the collaborative and inscriptive nature of affect. More broadly, the book takes up the political valency of such felt resonance with homelessness and contributes to empirical, methodological, and theoretical developments taking place within emotional geography and the sensory ethnography of place. The book can also be read in part as an engagement with the land scape of homelessness in Australia and in particular with the complex issues that connect to prolong the ongoing search for home by a small but significant group for whom hornelessness is a long-term process of cycling through rnultiple forrns of unstable accommodation, squatting, and rough sleeping