In this article, we offer a critical reading of the increasingly popular “post-qualitative” approach to research. We draw on insights from postcolonial theory to offer some provocations about the methodological and conceptual claims made by post-qualitative inquiry. The article considers how post-qualitative inquiry opens up possibilities for post-humanist social research. But, our critical reading of these “new” approaches argues that such research needs to attend to political and historical relations of social power, both in the worlds it constitutes and in the processes of its knowledge production. Without explicit attention to power and history, the (non)representational logics of post-qualitative inquiry risk operating less as “new” mechanisms for generative and subversive post-humanist research and more as processes of closure and erasure: closed-off from the worlds and people being researched.
This article explores the field of homelessness research in relation to the dynamics of contemporary inequality and governmentality, arguing that the dominant perspectives within this field have developed in ways that can converge with the demands of neoliberal governance. The article discusses the causal focus of much homelessness research, the emergence of the ‘orthodoxy’ of homelessness research and new approaches emphasising subjectivity and arguing for a ‘culture of homelessness’. We suggest that homelessness has been constructed as a discrete analytical object extraordinary to the social relations of contemporary inequality. The authority to represent homelessness legitimately has been constituted through positioning ‘the homeless’ outside of a community of valorised and normatively legitimate subjectivities. The article concludes with reflections on an alternative politics of homelessness research that moves towards a critical engagement with the position of homelessness within the structural dynamics of late modernity.
In this paper, we contend that the visual discourses of poverty and inequality are constructed through everyday social relations -the visual, spatial and bodily 'encounter' with homelessness in public space, steeped in the politics of the stigmatised Other. Bringing together Erving Goffman's theory of everyday encounters with Guy Debord's society of the spectacle, we explore the intersection between the 'sight' and 'scene' of homelessness and the spectacle of capital in public space. We identify how everyday encounters with homelessness perpetuate the notion that homelessness is 'out of joint' in relation to the spatial and aesthetic logic of capital and commodity consumption and performance. Reflecting on the repercussions of this for understanding homelessness, we explore the aesthetic dimension of the experience of homelessness within the context of a public space saturated by the social and aesthetic relations and of capital.
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