Homeless Lives in American Cities : Interrogating Myth and Locating Community PDF

Homeless Lives in American Cities: Interrogating Myth and Locating Community explores how the American discourse on homelessness arose from Victorian social and political anxieties about the impacts of immigration and urbanization on the middle class family.

These anxieties were negotiated by social activists and service providers, as well as those commenting on their work - journalists, sociologists, and finally policymakers.

It examines the stories told by all such invested parties, paying careful attention to the ways in which they described and diagnosed social problems before they developed institutions to redress them.

In doing so, Homeless Lives explains how their descriptive modes of portraying urban life shaped subsequent social science and policy.

It analyzes how religious language and images codified representations of urban problems, and through this process, explores how contemporary urban sociology, social work, and policy emerge from Victorian cultural attitudes about gender, class, the family, the city, and social life.