At Home. Traces of Precarious Habitation

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Published 27-10-2023
Claudia Girola

Abstract

This article looks at the meanings that men and women in situations of homelessness —subjected to an urbanity on edge in various communes in the Paris region— give to their living spaces. These meanings emerge from a series of scenes and ethnographic accounts of living practices and social interactions shared by these people. These stories of active lives highlight the interpretative and ethically questionable violence contained in the equation applied to the analysis of the daily experiences of these same people, which establishes a causal relationship between extreme socio-economic insecurity and an inability to take part in this world. An equation that reduces them to desocialised beings, incapable of building their own place, a home, where they can preserve their intimacy, organize their daily lives and at the same time open to others in a gesture of welcome and exchange. These stories of memories and homes, experiences, knowledge, and know-how reveal, in contrast to the de-socialising view, people carrying out a relentless daily struggle to confront the historical and structural determinants of their extreme living conditions, a struggle that makes them an inescapable and vital part of our common social world.

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Keywords

home, homeless people, memory, biographical refuges, reflexive ethnography

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