Paper short abstract:

What does it mean to "shelter in place" when experiencing housing insecurity? I examine how people experiencing homelessness creatively re-appropriate shelter in contexts of great risk, surveillance, and containment. I argue that their experiences represent emergent and predictable displacements.

Paper long abstract:

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, US state governments enacted what would become known as “shelter in place” orders, demanding that people stay at home except for essential outings. While many panicked about or railed against what was quickly emerging as a “new normal” of containment and surveillance, others—like the people experiencing homelessness who I was working with—accepted the news with little flourish. The response to the pandemic and its life-threatening potential followed the same patterns of exclusion, alienation, and abandonment that they were accustomed to. What did it mean, to them, to “shelter” in places that had always required some level of creative re-appropriation, clandestine movement and occupation, and acceptance of risk and danger? In this paper I take a layered approach to the concept of shelter, asking what it means to create shelter within and from those fundamentally hazardous conditions of life (and death) that have been produced through forces of destruction operating at various scales in the US (as elsewhere): from the general condition of neoliberal precarity; to the normalized alienation of those marked as societal others; to the intimate crises of loss, addiction, and family separation. In discomforting what it means to create shelter through (and in) place, I argue that these represent wholly predictable dis-placements that should be seen not as anomalous to, but as emblematic of, decades (and centuries) of economic rationalism that have worked, at various scales and forms, to alienate people from place.