Academic literature on the topic 'Homeless subculture'

The resurgence and visibility of homelessness since the 1980s have become significant social and political issues, widely debated in academic circles and in the popular press. The composition of the homeless population has changed markedly in this period, and now includes more women and children, and more of the deinstitutionalised mentally ill. The lives of street kids in the city of Newcastle, Australia show patterns of structured behaviour and territorial and social organisation. They have a distinctive group identity and moral order. Their subculture is complex with strains of nonpatriarchal and patriarchal relations combined with little tolerance of forms of difference. The moral code of the youth subculture may be a form of resistance to their histories of abuse but is also conservative in reproducing aspects of the culture that they resist. The social networks generated on the street provide a self-maintaining force which contributes to a culture of chronic homelessness.

Bartonella quintana and Bartonella henselaeare fastidious gram-negative bacteria responsible for bacillary angiomatosis, trench fever, cat scratch disease, and endocarditis. During a 5-year period, we received 2,043 samples for culture ofBartonella sp. We found Bartonella sp. to be the etiologic agent in 38 cases of endocarditis, 78 cases of cat scratch disease, 16 cases of bacteremia in homeless people, and 7 cases of bacillary angiomatosis. We correlated the results of positive cultures with the clinical form of the disease, type of sample, culture procedure, PCR-based genomic detection, and antibody determination. Seventy-two isolates of B. quintana and nine isolates ofB. henselae from 43 patients were obtained. Sixty-three of the B. quintana isolates and two of the B. henselae isolates, obtained from patients with no prior antibiotic therapy, were stably subcultured. The sensitivity of culture was low when compared with that of PCR-based detection methods in valves of patients with endocarditis (44 and 81%, respectively), skin biopsy samples of patients with bacillary angiomatosis (43 and 100%, respectively), and lymph nodes of cat scratch disease (13 and 30%, respectively). Serological diagnosis was also more sensitive in cases of endocarditis (97%) and cat scratch disease (90%). Among endocarditis patients, the sensitivity of the shell vial culture assay was 28% when inoculated with blood samples and 44% when inoculated with valvular biopsy samples, and the sensitivity of both was significantly higher than that of culture on agar (5% for blood [P = 0.045] and 4% for valve biopsy samples [P < 0.0005]). The most efficient culture procedure was the subculture of blood culture broth into shell vials (sensitivity, 71%). For patients with endocarditis, previous antibiotic therapy significantly affected results of blood culture; no patient who had been administered antibiotics yielded a positive blood culture, whereas 80% of patients with no previous antibiotic therapy yielded positive blood cultures (P = 0.0006). Previous antibiotic therapy did not, however, prevent isolation ofBartonella sp. from cardiac valves but did prevent the establishment of strains, as none of the 15 isolates from treated patients could be successfully subcultured. For the diagnosis ofB. quintana bacteremia in homeless people, the efficiency of systematic subculture of blood culture broth onto agar was higher than that of direct blood plating (respective sensitivities, 98 and 10% [P < 10−7]). Nevertheless, both procedures are complementary, since when used together their sensitivity reached 100%. All homeless people with positive blood cultures had negative serology. The isolation rate of B. henselae from PCR-positive lymph nodes, in patients with cat scratch disease, was significantly lower than that from valves of endocarditis patients and skin biopsy samples from bacillary angiomatosis patients (13 and 33%, respectively [P = 0.084]). In cases of bacillary angiomatosis for which an agent was identified to species level, the isolation rate of B. henselae was lower than the isolation rate of B. quintana (28 and 64%, respectively [P = 0.003]). If culture is to be considered an efficient tool for the diagnosis of several Bartonella-related diseases, methodologies need to be improved, notably for the recovery of B. henselae from lymph nodes of patients with cat scratch disease.

Contemporary folklorists working on place have increasingly highlighted power and conflict as key aspects of spatial construction and the concomitant identity formation this practice provides. Utilizing this perspective and building on the work of social geographers’ research on the homeless I document the ways in which urban spatial regimes structure everyday practices of a street kid community in downtown Toronto. Utilizing the distinction between prime and marginal space to build an ecological map of the urban landscape I argue that my research participants’ utilization of de Certeau’s tactic of temporal manipulation claim public microsites for subsistence practices but reproduce their own esoteric subculture within marginal or refuse spaces that constitute a distinct backstage which rarely appears in the literature.

After general comments on food cultures and their study, I consider some food subcultures and marginal ways of eating in Southwest France from the 17thcentury to the present day. I first discuss the transhumant pastoralist food cultures in Pyrenees and Aubrac. Their main characteristic was that the temporary life away from the villages led small man communities to cook daily in the absence of women that normally did in this region. Then, I consider the history of the vegetarianism/veganism in Southwest France. Jean-Antoine Gleïzès adopted his vegetarian lifestyle and wrote his books in this region. Marginal way of eating at its beginning, vegetarianism locally evolved into a real counter-culture. Lastly, I discuss the poor people marginal ways of eating, especially the homeless ones. They are adaptations to special contexts in which «being resourceful»is essential. Key words:food, cooking, shepherd, vegetarianism, homeless, marginality

Extant studies have labelled persons-with-addiction and the homeless as ‘invaders’ of public parks, aggressive/violent with psychiatric and medical disorders, a burden to the society, and transmitters of most deadly airborne or chronic diseases. Literature subtly discuses that such people must be chased out of the public. Yet, such studies have not concurrently analyzed from the viewpoint of urban parks users, the persons-with-addiction and the homeless people what needs to be done to improve the situation. Therefore, the study aims to explore whether problematic communities and subcultural factors make the disadvantaged resort to negative copping strategies when their legal means are blocked: how the other park users respond to the homeless drug addicts’ hardship: and the possible suggestions from all the park users. This is done with reference to social disorganization and Sub-culture theory, and through ethnographic research approach (8 months field observation) and in-depth-interviews with 27 participants. Our study found that persons-with-addiction and the homeless are not always aggressive/violent/harmful as they have been labelled. But only disadvantaged individuals who desire to emulate the ideals and ambitions of the middle class but lack resources to achieve such success. Being overwhelmed with such frustrations from their dilemmas, they consider themselves ‘double-failures’ and retreat into drug addiction and find abode in the public spaces. We therefore conclude that persons with addiction and the homeless people are not always violent and criminal persons who are to be chased out of public parks. But only disadvantaged individuals who need help for choosing a negative coping strategy.

This pilot study examined how homeless people in central Scotland integrate and appropriate mobile phones and the internet into their everyday lives, and the various meanings these information and communication technologies (ICTs) come to hold. It was found that ‘digital inclusion’ does not necessarily lead to ‘social inclusion’ into mainstream society, since homeless individuals tend to use ICTs in ways which reinforce the patterns and practices of their subculture – there is not a standard way of making use of technologies. Many homeless people thereby remain socially excluded in numerous ways despite their somewhat regular use of ICTs. It also emerged that mobile uptake can actually be more ‘inclusive’ than internet uptake.

Homeless young adults report being exposed to substantial violence and victimization. This often arises through street culture and norms associated with subcultures of violent behavior. In this exploratory study, we applied a decolonizing lens to conduct semi-structured interviews with 18 young adults experiencing homelessness in Victoria, Australia. In this study, we provide a contemporary description of peer relationships among homeless young adults. We examine how these relationships influence exposure to violence, and how young adults perceive and respond to injuries sustained by their peers because of exposure to violence. Findings showed bonds and relationships between homeless young adults appear to imitate the rapport and functions of sibling-kinship that typically exist in supportive family environments. Despite the care and protection provided within close peer relationships, these relationships may also contribute to exposure to violence by way of young adults witnessing violence perpetration and incidences of peers being physically victimized. There is an important duality between the perceived normalization of witnessing peers’ experiences of violence and young adults’ self-reflexive disclosure of vulnerability and helplessness in witnessing these incidents. Study findings have important research and practice implications for recognizing the influence and importance of peer relationships in the delivery of homelessness support programs.

This issue of M/C Journal is devoted to all things cute – Internet animals and stuffed toys, cartoon characters and branded bears. In what follows our nine contributors scrutinise a diverse range of media objects, discussing everything from the economics of Grumpy Cat and the aesthetics of Furbys to Reddit’s intellectual property dramas and the ethics of kitten memes. The articles range across diverse sites, from China to Canada, and equally diverse disciplines, including cultural studies, evolutionary economics, media anthropology, film studies and socio-legal studies. But they share a common aim of tracing out the connections between degraded media forms and wider questions of culture, identity, economy and power. Our contributors tell riveting stories about these connections, inviting us to see the most familiar visual culture in a new way. We are not the first to take cute media seriously as a site of cultural politics, and as an industry in its own right. Cultural theory has a long, antagonistic relationship with the kitsch and the disposable. From the Frankfurt School’s withering critique of cultural commodification to revisionist feminist accounts that emphasise the importance of the everyday, critics have been conducting sporadic incursions into this space for the better part of a century. The rise of cultural studies, a discipline committed to analysing “the scrap of ordinary or banal existence” (Morris and Frow xviii), has naturally provided a convincing intellectual rationale for such research, and has inspired an impressive array of studies on such things as Victorian-era postcards (Milne), Disney films (Forgacs), Hallmark cards (West, Jaffe) and stock photography (Frosh). A parallel strand of literary theory considers the diverse registers of aesthetic experience that characterize cute content (Brown, Harris). Sianne Ngai has written elegantly on this topic, noting that “while the avant-garde is conventionally imagined as sharp and pointy, as hard- or cutting-edge, cute objects have no edge to speak of, usually being soft, round, and deeply associated with the infantile and the feminine” (814). Other scholars trace the historical evolution of cute aesthetics and commodities. Cultural historians have documented the emergence of consumer markets for children and how these have shaped what we think of as cute (Cross). Others have considered the history of domestic animal imagery and its symptomatic relationship with social anxieties around Darwinism, animal rights, and pet keeping (Morse and Danahay, Ritvo). And of course, Japanese popular culture – with its distinctive mobilization of cute aesthetics – has attracted its own rich literature in anthropology and area studies (Allison, Kinsella). The current issue of M/C Journal extends these lines of research while also pushing the conversation in some new directions. Specifically, we are interested in the collision between cute aesthetics, understood as a persistent strand of mass culture, and contemporary digital media. What might the existing tradition of “cute theory” mean in an Internet economy where user-generated content sites and social media have massively expanded the semiotic space of “cute” – and the commercial possibilities this entails? As the heir to a specific mode of degraded populism, the Internet cat video may be to the present what the sitcom, the paperback novel, or the Madonna video was to an earlier moment of cultural analysis. Millions of people worldwide start their days with kittens on Roombas. Global animal brands, such as Maru and Grumpy Cat, are appearing, along with new talent agencies for celebrity pets. Online portal I Can Haz Cheezburger has received millions of dollars in venture capital funding, becoming a diversified media business (and then a dotcom bubble). YouTube channels, Twitter hashtags and blog rolls form an infrastructure across which a vast amount of cute-themed user-generated content, as well as an increasing amount of commercially produced and branded material, now circulates. All this reminds us of the oft-quoted truism that the Internet is “made of kittens”, and that it’s “kittens all the way down”. Digitization of cute culture leads to some unusual tweaks in the taste hierarchies explored in the aforementioned scholarship. Cute content now functions variously as an affective transaction, a form of fandom, and as a subcultural discourse. In some corners of the Internet it is also being re-imagined as something contemporary, self-reflexive and flecked with irony. The example of 4Chan and LOLcats, a jocular, masculinist remix of the feminized genre of pet photography, is particularly striking here. How might the topic of cute look if we moving away from the old dialectics of mass culture critique vs. defense and instead foreground some of these more counter-intuitive aspects, taking seriously the enormous scale and vibrancy of the various “cute” content production systems – from children’s television to greeting cards to CuteOverload.com – and their structural integration into current media, marketing and lifestyle industries? Several articles in this issue adopt this approach, investigating the undergirding economic and regulatory structures of cute culture. Jason Potts provides a novel economic explanation for why there are so many animals on the Internet, using a little-known economic theory (the Alchian-Allen theorem) to explain the abundance of cat videos on YouTube. James Meese explores the complex copyright politics of pet images on Reddit, showing how this online community – which is the original source of much of the Internet’s animal gifs, jpegs and videos – has developed its own procedures for regulating animal image “piracy”. These articles imaginatively connect the soft stuff of cute content with the hard stuff of intellectual property and supply-and-demand dynamics. Another line of questioning investigates the political and bio-political work involved in everyday investments in cute culture. Seen from this perspective, cute is an affect that connects ground-level consumer subjectivity with various economic and political projects. Carolyn Stevens’ essay offers an absorbing analysis of the Japanese cute character Rilakkuma (“Relaxed Bear”), a wildly popular cartoon bear that is typically depicted lying on the couch and eating sweets. She explores what this representation means in the context of a stagnant Japanese economy, when the idea of idleness is taking on a new shade of meaning due to rising under-employment and precarity. Sharalyn Sanders considers a fascinating recent case of cute-powered activism in Canada, when animal rights activists used a multimedia stunt – a cat, Tuxedo Stan, running for mayor of Halifax, Canada – to highlight the unfortunate situation of stray and feral felines in the municipality. Sanders offers a rich analysis of this unusual political campaign and the moral questions it provokes. Elaine Laforteza considers another fascinating collision of the cute and the political: the case of Lil’ Bub, an American cat with a rare genetic condition that results in a perpetually kitten-like facial expression. During 2011 Lil’ Bub became an online phenomenon of the first order. Laforteza uses this event, and the controversies that brewed around it, as an entry point for a fascinating discussion of the “cute-ification” of disability. These case studies remind us once more of the political stakes of representation and viral communication, topics taken up by other contributors in their articles. Radha O’Meara’s “Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? How Cat Videos Disguise Surveillance as Unselfconscious Play” provides a wide-ranging textual analysis of pet videos, focusing on the subtle narrative structures and viewer positioning that are so central to the pleasures of this genre. O’Meara explains how the “cute” experience is linked to the frisson of surveillance, and escape from surveillance. She also explains the aesthetic differences that distinguish online dog videos from cat videos, showing how particular ideas about animals are hardwired into the apparently spontaneous form of amateur content production. Gabriele de Seta investigates the linguistics of cute in his nuanced examination of how a new word – meng – entered popular discourse amongst Mandarin Chinese Internet users. de Seta draws our attention to the specificities of cute as a concept, and how the very notion of cuteness undergoes a series of translations and reconfigurations as it travels across cultures and contexts. As the term meng supplants existing Mandarin terms for cute such as ke’ai, debates around how the new word should be used are common. De Seta shows us how deploying these specific linguistic terms for cuteness involve a range of linguistic and aesthetic judgments. In short, what exactly is cute and in what context? Other contributors offer much-needed cultural analyses of the relationship between cute aesthetics, celebrity and user-generated culture. Catherine Caudwell looks at the once-popular Furby toy brand its treatment in online fan fiction. She notes that these forms of online creative practice offer a range of “imaginative and speculative” critiques of cuteness. Caudwell – like de Seta – reminds us that “cuteness is an unstable aesthetic that is culturally contingent and very much tied to behaviour”, an affect that can encompass friendliness, helplessness, monstrosity and strangeness. Jonathon Hutchinson’s article explores “petworking”, the phenomenon of social media-enabled celebrity pets (and pet owners). Using the famous example of Boo, a “highly networked” celebrity Pomeranian, Hutchinson offers a careful account of how cute is constructed, with intermediaries (owners and, in some cases, agents) negotiating a series of careful interactions between pet fans and the pet itself. Hutchinson argues if we wish to understand the popularity of cute content, the “strategic efforts” of these intermediaries must be taken into account. Each of our contributors has a unique story to tell about the aesthetics of commodity culture. The objects they analyse may be cute and furry, but the critical arguments offered here have very sharp teeth. We hope you enjoy the issue.Acknowledgments Thanks to Axel Bruns at M/C Journal for his support, to our hard-working peer reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments, and to the Swinburne Institute for Social Research for the small grant that made this issue possible. ReferencesAllison, Anne. “Cuteness as Japan’s Millenial Product.” Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon. Ed. Joseph Tobin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 34-48. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Cross, Gary. The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Forgacs, David. "Disney Animation and the Business of Childhood." Screen 33.4 (1992): 361-374. Frosh, Paul. "Inside the Image Factory: Stock Photography and Cultural Production." Media, Culture & Society 23.5 (2001): 625-646. Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Jaffe, Alexandra. "Packaged Sentiments: The Social Meanings of Greeting Cards." Journal of Material Culture 4.2 (1999): 115-141. Kinsella, Sharon. “Cuties in Japan” Women, Media and Consumption in Japan. Ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. 220 - 54. Frow, John, and Meaghan Morris, eds. Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence. New York: Routledge, 2012. Morse, Deborah and Martin Danahay, eds. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. 2007. Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (2005): 811-847. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. West, Emily. "When You Care Enough to Defend the Very Best: How the Greeting Card Industry Manages Cultural Criticism." Media, Culture & Society 29.2 (2007): 241-261.

In Australia the homeless population has become more diverse over the last 20 years with more young people, women and families experiencing homelessness. It is also evident that there is considerable variation in the length of time people remain homeless. How these changes relate to movements into and out of the homeless population is not well understood. This research asks: 'Is there a connection between how people become homeless, how long they remain homeless and how they 'get out' of homelessness?' A review of the literature identified two gaps directly relevant to the issue of movement in and out of homelessness. First, it is not well understood why people experience homelessness for different lengths of time when they face similar structural conditions. Second, the prevalence of substance use and mental illness reported in the homeless population has led some to conclude these factors cause homelessness. However, researchers have generally been unclear about whether such problems precede or are a consequence of homelessness. In addition, research has generally presumed a relationship between the amount of time a person is homeless and patterns of behavioural and cognitive adaptation to a homeless way of life. Yet recent research suggests that people's biographies play a significant role in the duration of homelessness. How these different findings relate to each other remains unclear. This thesis investigates these issues through a longitudinal study of homeless households. Data was gathered in two rounds of semi-structured interviews. In the first round 103 interviews were conducted. Approximately one year later 79 of these households were re-interviewed. The process of, and connections between becoming, being and exiting the homeless pathway are analysed using the 'pathways' concept. While on these pathways homeless people actively produce and reproduce social structures including both embracing and rejecting the stigma and subculture associated with homelessness. This complex world of homelessness is then analysed by extending the pathways concept by distinguishing five ideal type pathways based on the main reason for becoming homeless. They are a mental health pathway, a domestic violence pathway, a substance use pathway, a housing crisis pathway and a youth pathway. The research indicates that people on each pathway respond to the experience of homelessness differently and this has implications for the amount of time they spend in the homeless population. People on the substance use and youth pathways commonly describe themselves as 'homeless', focus on the 'here and now', use the welfare service system, are very mobile, and over time, many start to sleep rough. Their embrace of the homeless subculture commonly 'locks' them into the homeless population for long periods of time. In contrast people on the domestic violence and housing crisis pathways generally do not identify themselves as homeless and resist involvement with other homeless people. These homeless careers tend to be shorter. Then there are those who enter homelessness on the mental health pathway. They were frequently exploited in the early stages of their homeless careers and most sought to avoid exploitation by isolating themselves which then increased their marginalisation. These were the longest homeless careers. The use of the pathways concept also helps to understand how the circumstances of homeless people can change while they are homeless. The research found that some homeless people changed pathways. In particular the study found that two thirds of the people who reported substance use problems developed these problems after they became homeless. Most of these people entered the homeless population on the youth pathway. The research also found that three quarters of the people with mental health issues developed these issues after they became homeless, and that for some this was also connected to drug use. Overcoming homelessness is never easy and individuals manage the process in different ways. Again the pathways concept proved useful to understanding how homeless people accomplished this. The findings show that people travelling the different pathways require different levels and types of assistance to resolve their homelessness. The research concludes that the process of re-integration can take a long time but, given the right social and economic support, every homeless career can end.

À partir d’une approche ethnographique collaborative entre chercheur et enquêtés, mêlant observation participante, récits de vie, entretiens auprès de jeunes vivant dans un squat et auprès de travailleurs sociaux, de commerçants, de riverains nous avons tenté de saisir ce qui dans les trajectoires des acteurs favorisait l’inscription dans cet univers de la rue qu’est la Zone et dans sa culture, ce qui jouait dans les divers inclinements identitaires zonards. Différents modes d’être « jeune en errance », ou plutôt zonard ont été repérés. En usant des théories de la socialisation, de la déviance, des interactions goffmaniennes et de l’ethnicité, nous avons pu mettre à jour des logiques synchroniques et diachroniques explicatives. L’orientation vers la Zone ne s’effectue pas sans les influences de la famille, de l'institution scolaire, du contexte écologique. Ils provoquent des désajustements auxquels la socialisation juvénile de pairs répondra par la pratique d’activités délinquantes. Le positionnement plus ou moins engagé dans la Zone dépend par ailleurs de certaines spécificités biographiques et de l'investissement dans la carrière zonarde. Des facteurs exogènes comme le traitement sanitaire et social en direction de ces jeunes et les représentations du sens commun qui leurs sont attachées, concourent à un étiquetage social, une discrimination, qui associés aux expériences passées des acteurs favorisent alors la pérennisation de l’identité zonarde et accentuent sa déviance en érigeant des frontières entre zonards et normaux
To study French young homeless we use an ethnographic collaborative approach with one population of the following study fields: young homeless of one squat (interviews, participant observation, life interviews) ; and interviews, reunion observations with social workers, storekeepers and local residents. We tried to understand which street youth life trajectories facilitated the enrolment in that street world that is designated: "the Zone" and what contributes to "zonard" identity and culture. Various ways to be "wandering youth", or rather "zonard" were located. By using socialization, deviance, Goffman’s interactions and ethnicity theories, we were able to shed light on synchronic and diachronic logics leading them to it. The Zone orientation needs specific family, school, ecological, and neighbourhood backgrounds, which provoke adjustment problems. We find that young peers socialization and it activities answer to background life tensions. The position of being more or less committed in the Zone depends on actors’ biographies specificities and on their Zone careers investment. Exogenous factors such as the sanitary and social treatments, the common sense representations of youth street contribute to a social labelling, a discrimination. Associated with past backgrounds, they encourage the Zone identity continuation, increase deviant practices and build borders between normals and Zonards

The aim of this diploma thesis is to familiarize with offer of welfare services for homeless people in Benešov City on the basis of theoretical knowledge and information about phenomenon of homelessness. Also to show the influence of social services offer on the life of homeless person, to call attention to other connections and importance of a form of social service help in a role of low-cost daily centre, doss-houses and field services for people without shelter. For research part of the thesis was chosen a qualitative research for its possibilities to examine some specific broadly defined phenomenon and to bring sufficient amount of information about it. Case study method was used. Results of the research part are summarized in the end. The effect of use of social services offer for homeless people in Benešov city on the quality of their lives is exposed. Discovered conclusions point out to importance of help and support which is offered through social services.