The Mobile Thriving Respite With and for the Street Community

Introduction

Some evenings, I (Bob McInerney) walk back from work across the magnificent Smithfield Street Bridge in the bitter cold, or in snowy torrents, gusting winds, stirring sleet, and heavy rain. The weather aches my body. I get into my car, and drive home to a place where I am secure and warm. This work did not begin with scholarship alone, despite the theories to follow. It began with embodiment, with the bare and identifiable experience of vulnerability to nature and existence. Embodiment may facilitate a researcher’s empathy for those they work with (c.f. Finlay, 2006).

Sovereign Power and Homelessness

Leonard Feldman (2004), in his book Citizens Without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Action states, “I seek to pry loose the problem of homelessness from the dominant discursive frameworks of charity, need, punishment, and pathology” (p. 24). As Feldman points out, there has been a pronounced historical trajectory in the United Sates regarding how we see and treat those who are living outside. ¹ We have moved from the 1980s “politics of compassion” to the 1990s “politics of compassion fatigue,” and finally to our current state of “punitive homeless policies” (e.g., public banning, fencing, spikes in doorways). This trajectory goes so far as to make it, in some instances, unlawful to help those living outside (p. 2). ²

As public and private spaces became increasingly interrelated, and their distinction blurred (shopping malls, restaurants that spill onto the streets, outdoor markets), home-dwelling citizens—and the politics of ownership—preserved the proprietorship of these spaces. We can interpret public spaces as enacting an ongoing perception and action—banning others as well as an a-ban-don-ment of others (see Agamben, 1995). Etymologically understood, the word “ban” (bannum) is related to and signifies banishment, curse, and condemnation, which comes from a sovereign and lawful proclamation. Carl Schmitt defines sovereign power as those in power “. . . who decide on the state of exception” regarding individuals’ civil rights (Schmitt as cited in Agamben, 1995, p. 11). Schmitt’s definition, as a National Socialist in 1930s Germany, was meant to bolster support for the ruling of a totalitarian regime. Giorgio Agamben (1995), working off Schmitt’s elucidation of sovereignty, notes that sovereignty does not always adhere to the juridical and lawful, as a sovereign power can—and does—bend and create laws that are states of exception within the prevailing governing rule and born of believed states of emergency (e.g., war, natural disasters, pandemics, immigration, homelessness). Agamben moves away from Schmitt’s attempt to preserve the law and sees the state of exception as the changing reach and realm of the law, where some people may be oppressed by an exception to the rule of the law usually based upon a state of emergency. For Agamben, the contemporary interplay of emergency and exception brings forth the possibility of unquestionable power in any government (Agamben, 1995). The state of exception marks what can be done outside the law, and, at the same time creates sovereignty within the law, seemingly upholding the law even as some peoples’ legal rights are flouted.

Note that when sovereignty bans certain others, these others do not reside outside the law; they mark the changeability of the order and boundaries of the law and of sovereignty itself.

Thus, the state of exception does not produce “chaos,” nor is it a chaotic state (pp. 18–19). Agamben clarifies, “We shall give the name relation of exception to the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion” (p. 18). The state of exception is then a threshold; this threshold is occupied, so to speak, by a banned people who are included by virtue of the state of exception and at the same time excluded by virtue of the ban. We will elaborate on this exposed way of being below. For now, as Agamben makes clear, “What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandoned it—at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured” (p. 110).

When we cry out with those suffering abject poverty, those who may be presumed homeless, transient, or nomadic, and regularly bear the brunt of sovereignty’s state of emergency and exception, we see the shifting ground and inequality of our laws. Some people are kept to live on the brink of life, bare lives surviving far too close to sickness, injury, and death.

Feldman (2004) suggests “Home-dwelling citizen and homeless bare life are political statuses, not social statuses or elements of personal identity” (p. 20). This statement, of course, runs counter to our perfunctory notion that one becomes homeless primarily because of a psychologically locatable internal unworthiness, such as drug addiction, mental illness, or even a weakness in one’s assumed moral character. Feldman clarifies that there are “. . . four prevailing themes in the misrecognition of the homeless [. . .] as nonpersons [. . .] disruptive subjects responsible for their plight [. . .] helpless victims. . .[or] clients with pathologies” (p. 92).

While there is some truth that our personal experiences and choices have an impact on the lives we live, this work focuses on an us, not an imagined them, on society and community, not on individual differences. To locate and reduce homelessness to individual experiences and choices, or to individual pathology, is to ignore our collective role in the phenomenon of homelessness. We focus instead on abandonment and lives made and kept bare, lives left to simply survive. Let us follow Feldman’s lead and examine how the idea of bare life helps us toward more understanding regarding homelessness as a phenomenon.

Bare Life

Agamben (1995) begins with the Aristotelian distinction between zoē and bios, the former signifying the biological body (life form or life itself) and its inseparability from nature (a body that survives in and through nature) and the latter signifying the political body, and potentially the living of the good life, which is, in part, granted by politics (including laws, human rights, justice as arbitrated by the city-state or polis). Agamben works through this distinction between zoē and the good life; he suggests that to live the good life indicates that one does not merely survive natural existence, but one can thrive within existence with the necessary help of the polis.

Bare life, as Agamben explains, is not zoē; remember that zoē is simply life, but bare life is an existence where zoē is exposed to the polis: “Not simple natural life, but a life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element” (p. 88). Through the acts of the polis, zoē is transfigured to a bare, exposed being. Understandably, the good life is not guaranteed by the polis, but we now may appreciate that those who are part of a street community live surrounded by a presumed good life, to some extent, and are either banned from, unable, or unwilling to reap its presumed benefits (or aspects of all three).

For Agamben, those who are banned from the good life, by virtue of a political exclusion, define the polis and sovereignty. As Fitzpatrick (2005) makes clear, sovereignty itself “. . . is constituted in its power over bare life, in it producing bare life” (p. 49). Sovereignty produces the bareness of vulnerability itself through various governing exposures. For instance, while we have biological/neurological bodies, the shape, color, gender, size, and sexuality of our bodies matter within the reach and realm of the polis/society, and this mattering as signifying something comes with varying degrees of painful and pleasurable exposures. While as Judith Butler (2006) points out, “. . . we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life,” vulnerability “. . . becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions” (p. 29). We must survive these exacerbations and endure the criticisms and praises of our bare and vulnerable beings from powers beyond our control. We can say, following Agamben (1995), that in surviving, bare life is suspended (see also Fitzpatrick, 2005, pp. 62–64). For example, Butler uses Agamben’s notion of bare life in the analysis of prisoners seemingly in “indefinite detention” (e.g., Guantanamo) claiming “To be detained indefinitely, for instance, is precisely to have no definitive prospect for a reentry into the political fabric of life, even as one’s situation is highly, if not fatally, politicized” (p. 68). We make a similar comparison with those living outside and on the streets; they are in a kind of politicized and institutionalized indefinite detention. This is because the laws that cocreate the good life seem to simultaneously cocreate the identity and agency of the home-dwelling citizen as psychologically healthy, capable, rational, and adaptable. Homelessness as a political phenomenon then affirms a system in which a proper and worthy life is attainable by those with requisite capabilities, an existence that remains within the boundaries of the political institutionalizing of the good life (see Agamben, 1996/2000).

Bare, vulnerable human life emerges at the confluence of property ownership rights and violence. In fact, property rights that define the good life have been, since the Romans, associated with the right to dispose of one’s property (proper possessions) as one saw fit (Nancy, 1991). Esposito (2011) shows that historically “. . . in fact the things which the property owner had the right to use or abuse at will were for the most part human beings” (p. 26). Agamben (1996/2000) tells us that politics operates within a “dialectic of proper and improper” and that in totalitarian states, “the proper demands the exclusion of any impropriety” which, again, may mean human beings (p. 116).

Therefore, in thinking of states of emergency and exception, and the political production of bare life, we see similar effects of an always permeating and possible totalitarianism (c.f., Arendt, 1968). Now we ask, does neoliberalism’s preservation of the good life perpetuate a different sort of domination—the systematic separation of the proper from the improper and the promotion of home ownership and consumption as an (or the) appropriate means of living a good life? Let us now explore the interrelationship of neoliberalism and biopolitics.

Neoliberalism and Biopolitics

Historically, liberal freedom from sovereign power meant to move beyond the lords of the land, to own property, and thus be proper. Nancy (1991) explains, “Property is an ontological determination. It does not designate the object possessed, but the subject of the object” (p. 95). To own property meant, in part, to live the good and proper life. This historical and political move, again seen as liberation from the sovereign power of old (e.g., kings and queens, masters, feudalism, and totalitarianism), led us to new regimes of power whereby whole populations are managed in terms of health and productivity within a laissez-faire capitalist, consuming, and producing nation state. Life is good, and living the good life seems, at least, to be a liberally free choice—this is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is about the presumed psychological and physical health, monetary flourishing, and social privileges gained through economic and political practices of liberation by way of a free market. The state then defers to the free market. Liberal freedom and prospering are enhanced “within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” and the state’s role is to ensure, “create and preserve” this free and liberal structure (Harvey, 2005, p. 2). Neoliberalism seeks to show “. . . how the overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of a market economy” and “projecting them on to a general art of government” (Foucault, 1978/2004, p. 131).

As some nation states moved away from sovereign power, two forms of power governing individuals emerged with neoliberalism: disciplinary, and biopolitical. Michel Foucault (1997/2003) has notably outlined how sovereign power was to some extent displaced by a disciplinary power that worked upon the individual human body: “sovereignty’s old right—to take life or let live—was replaced but it came to be complimented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it” (p. 241). This new exposure as disciplinary includes “surveillance,” “visibility,” and “confession” as well as self-regulation, and even forms of self-punishment in the way of personal restrictions and self-loathing; it is a form of power for all not to see. Indeed, for Foucault, we willingly confess our unworthiness and consume all that will assumedly help us be better. To be disciplined meant to be a follower (disciple) and consumer of the trends, fashion, politics, media, and products perpetually made available—our individual desires became the producible and saleable goods of the good life (and as we never seem to be good enough).

Foucault shows another form of power that moves from disciplining the body (or individual) to regulation of whole populations; this he calls biopolitics. As people liberally took from what the market offered, we became the market itself; we became that which is marketable. Human populations became that which can be utilized, farmed, mined, and tooled. Foucault tells us “Biopolitics deals with the population, the population as a political problem” (p. 245).

Agamben, in dialog with the work of Foucault, defines biopolitics as the “. . . growing inclusion of [human being’s] natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power” (p. 119; see also Arendt, 1968). Combining Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty (above) with Foucault, Agamben interprets that “In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or nonvalue of life as such” (p. 142). Note that in agreement with Foucault, for Agamben, biopolitics decides on the quality and worth of living life—not on whether one lives or dies, or even on the oppression of others as servants or slaves. Biopolitics does not seek slaves; it seeks a population enslaved by its own practices and beliefs. Biopolitics would not directly kill off people, as people are its resource. Foucault (1997/2003) tells us, “Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regulation, and it, in contrast consists in making live and letting die” (p. 247). Those marginalized in a society must either conform to the good life (making live) or endure the potential lethality of the margins (letting die).

No doubt our readers see this connection—within neoliberal and biopolitical power, those of the street community are let to die, while home-dwelling citizens are made to live—and to live the good life is to live as a presumed owner and consumer. In other words, neoliberalism and a capitalist society let us live (i.e., produces living the good life) through the continual, and perhaps overwhelming, production of an assumed good life.

Foucault relates that biopolitics will exert “control over relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are living beings, and their environment, and the milieu in which they live” (p. 245). This control happens by way of social apparatuses (dispositif), which, in turn, create a style and conformity of making live, which includes as its byproduct “accidents,” “infirmities,” and “various anomalies” thereby producing “charitable institutions” (p. 244). Within a hypercapitalistic society, where success is tied deeply to individualism, and proper home ownership, the byproduct is acceptable homelessness and the charities that respond to this phenomenon.

For Foucault (1978/2008), biopolitics emerges from a neoliberalism that must “. . . arbitrate between the freedom and security of individuals by reference to this notion of danger” (p. 66). Thus, neoliberalism is an “art of government” for “living dangerously” and from this style of living comes the necessity for “control, constraint, coercion” (p. 67). Furthermore, freedoms are then increased as is “additional control and intervention” (p. 67). Eventually, neoliberalism begins to see the human population as a resource for the promotion of proper living. Foucault (2007) touches on this proper living as a “regulatory apparatus” that “prevents idleness and vagrancy” because the population came to be seen as a “productive force” (p. 69). Homelessness would be, for Foucault, regulated as a state of emergency and an “epidemic” that is an acceptable consequence of a population living the good life as home-dwelling and proper proprietors (p. 69).

Once the sovereign state’s reign over life and death was no longer of issue (according to Foucault, 1997/2003), to make live within the natural world became paramount, which means to survive disease, natural disasters, and the contagion of the other. With biopolitics, the death of the “inferior” makes life “healthier” (p. 255). Foucault outlines the biopolitical interest in disease and contagion: “public hygiene,” “medical care,” and “normalized knowledge” (p. 244). Likewise, Foucault relates this “regulation” of the population “which encourage[s] patterns of saving related to housing, to the renting of accommodations” and includes “insurance,” “pensions,” and “hygiene” as part of the biopolitical regime (p. 251). Biopolitics, in its permeating control over populations, creates models of healthy, consuming, and productive living that are threatened by any othering contagion. Homelessness is the contagion that threatens and critiques the life of the home-dwelling citizen.

To Make Survive

Agamben (2002) explains that biopolitics’ “. . . primary objective is to transform the care of life and the biological as such into the concern of State power” (p. 155). Importantly though, Agamben takes Foucault’s “making live” a step further to “make survive” (p. 155). For Agamben (2002), making survive moves beyond the threat of sovereignty’s ability to kill, or even the making live and letting die of biopolitics; Agamben sees surviving as the perpetuation of a liminal existence—an existence within zones of indistinction—whereby one’s surviving is neither being dead nor living the good life. We just survive, like the example of the muselmann of the Nazi concentration camps that Agamben offers. Agamben explains, “The muselmann is not only or not so much a limit between life and death; rather, he marks the threshold between the human and inhuman” (p. 55). Seemingly half dead, emaciated, and with the spark of life gone from their eyes, Agamben uses the horror of the muselmann to further our understanding of biopolitics and what he calls homo sacer.

Homo Sacer: A Goat or a Lamb?

Agamben (1995) designates a bare and vulnerable “limit figure” (p. 25) as “. . . homo sacer, which names something like the originary political relation, which is to say, bare life, in so far as it operates in an inclusive exclusion as the referent of the sovereign decision” (p. 85). Agamben uses the term “limit” to show that this person or persons define the limits of sovereign power and the polis. What does Agamben mean by the term “sacer?” To clarify, the word sacred, in its early meaning, signifies that which is kept and sequestered for spiritual and religious rituals. This preservation and separation came with a scrutiny; namely, political, and religious sovereign power asks, is this being worthy of sacrifice? Will this sacrificial being save the community from its sins? Thus, for Agamben (1995), “We must therefore ask ourselves if the structure of sovereignty and the structure of sacratio might be connected. . .” (p. 83).

With his examination of early Greek life and ritual sacrifice, Agamben theorizes that “Life became sacred only through a series of rituals whose aim was precisely to separate life from its profane context” (p. 66). The ritual sacrifice was a search for purity and purification of the community. It might help for us to think of the historical and stereotyped virgin sacrifice. Such was a sacrifice with the intent of casting off the unwanted and impure. The sacrifice is a state of exception in which the virgin could be killed but not murdered (i.e., with no legal penalties). ³ Note that the human virgin (or animal) carried sacrificial meaning; the sacrifice was meant to bring forth a greater good for the community. Consequently, these ancient sacrifices were not random, specious, or superficial; they were considered purposeful, true, and having depth.

If a human being is scapegoated, this person(s) is victimized; they are blamed for the sins of the community and either put to death or experience the death of the good life within the community (i.e., banned or marginalized) as legislated. Seen sacrificially, the scapegoated victim carried the sins of the community. With this scapegoating, the community need not look at its own violence, sexual desires, and culpability (see also Girard, 1977, 1986) ⁴ ; Those scapegoated are not willing participants in a ritual; in religious practice, the goat was an e-scaped animal, which meant banned to atone for the sins of the community.

In contrast, the primordial sacrificial lamb represented a willingness to take part in a death that is meant to unite and purify a community. It is interesting to note the passivity associated with lambs; is the sacrificial lamb willing or simply passive? Mythically, the lamb has been used to represent both purity and passivity. Can we imagine a being scapegoated and banned (like the goat sent off into the wild to carry away our sins) and not willingly or knowingly sacrificed like the lamb? This being, according to Agamben, is homo sacer.

Homo sacer is that being that can be abandoned and kept close to death without legal consequences and victimized/scapegoated without notice, reverence, or communal meaning. The inclusion/exclusion of homo sacer is part of the foundation of community:

That which is excluded from the community is, in reality, that on which the entire life of the community is founded . . . thus the sacred is necessarily an ambiguous and circular concept (in Latin sacer means vile, ignominious, and also august, reserved for the gods . . .). (Agamben, 1991, p. 105)

Recall Agamben’s distinction between zoē and bios and here from the bare life that becomes homo sacer: “Yet this [bare] life is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoē of the Greeks, nor bios, a qualified form of life. It is, rather, the bare life of homo sacer [. . .] a zone of indistinction” (p. 109). The zone of indistinction is where homo sacer resides, so to speak, at the limit, the horizonal edge of humanness. Regarding identity and humanity, homo sacer is, theoretically, a being that is not this or that, not an either/or, but is sanctioned and invisible as a neither/nor—blamed for their own predicament, unable or unwilling to consume and produce within the parameters of the good life, their indistinct suffering is formed and allowed by the state. Homo sacer is this particular kind of bare and meaningless life.

The sacer, or sacred, is key in our understanding of bare life. Within this zone of indistinction, homini sacri then becomes a prototype for all excluded people: a life lost between human and inhuman; as we have said, a being so utterly abject that it can be killed or brought close to death without legal consequences or sacrificial meaning. Being neither sacred nor profane, homo sacer is exposed by sovereign power: “. . .the person whom anyone could kill with impunity was nevertheless not to be put to death according to ritual practices” (Agamben, 1995, p. 72).

Can neoliberalism (and biopolitics) produce homo sacer? A person living on the streets may occupy a zone of indistinction whereby their suffering is seen as meaningless (without value, without a well-meaning look at ourselves, our policies, institutions, and morality). This same person can be let and left to suffer. When we walk by a person who may be living on the streets and pass without a look of recognition and welcome, without a nod or even a smile, we have to some extent co-constituted this person’s existence as meaningless. Dare we say that in this act of passing without notice, we co-constitute this person as someone relinquished and discarded.

We are not suggesting here that people living on the streets can be or are killed with impunity from the law. Nor are we suggesting that people living on the streets do not inspire kindness and hope and we do recognize, notice, and affirm others too. Others in society are not explicitly complicit or responsible for the exponential rise of homelessness—within these prevailing systems, many of us do not know what to do! What we are suggesting is that people living on the streets, within the prevailing systems (i.e., ideologies and practices) described above, can be kept surviving lethal circumstances on an everyday basis, such as exposure to the harshness of the weather, exposure to medical issues worsened by their circumstance, and exposure to the violence of others without easy access to help from authorities.

Agamben (1995) asks, “What, then, is the life of homo sacer, if it is situated at the intersection of a capacity to be killed and yet not sacrificed, outside both human and divine law?” (p. 73). We have seen that for Agamben, the “bare life of the citizen” is politized, forming “. . . the new biopolitical body of humanity” (p. 9).

Thanatopolitics and Homo Sacer

Agamben (1995) tells us “. . . the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics” (p. 122). This perpetual surviving, and the life of homo sacer, is maintained then by another form of power, thanatopolitics (a politics of death) that, in turn, makes a good life for some, while others are inevitably brought and kept close to death. Here Agamben helps us to understand the transformation of biopolitics to thanatopolitics and the production of populations of people who merely survive close to death.

Therefore, the underbelly of biopolitics is a politics of death that produces homo sacer. Homo sacer is part of an obligatory system of death approximations in relation to the construction of the good, producing, and consuming life. Agamben (2002) states “In human beings, life bears with it a caesura that can transform all life into survival and all survival into life” (p. 133). Those living in the streets are let to die, not always an actual death, but a surviving death as we described above.

In fact, as Feldman (2004) explains “. . . property legitimately possessed by street dwellers is restricted to those items essential for physical survival, reduced to that which sustains bare life” (p. 65). If a thanatopolitical, charitable governmentality keeps some docile and surviving, what of actively thriving beyond surviving? Put differently, can we work together at a local, grassroots level, and resist merely surviving within a neoliberal, biopolitical, and thanatopolitical governing system? Let us now look at the respite itself.

The Mobile Thriving Respite (MTR)

For the past 5 years, Point Park University graduate students in the Master of Arts in Community Psychology program have been working as advocate ethnographers, gathering data about the lived experiences of the street community. “Advocate ethnographers allow participants to define their reality, consider their view about the ideal solution to their problems and then take an active role in making social change happen” (Fetterman, 1998, p. 135). The data collected by the research team (e.g., interviews, field notes from participant-observation) revealed the crucial need to go beyond surviving the streets (i.e., coats, blankets, medical attention, and food) to thriving. Based on the qualitative data gathered, in January 2019, I (Bob McInerney) and Point Park University psychology students launched the MTR, designed for sustained, social, and psychologically supportive outreach. ⁵ MTR locations and times were advertised through community partners and in places the street community frequents via flyers. Locations were found (see below), and there were sandwich boards on the street inviting people in and letting folks know about future events.

The thriving respites provided a place to socialize, learn, grow, feel empowered, relax, and have fun. They were designed to offer opportunities to destress and access one’s creativity and dignity. Typical activities at the respites included card and game playing, listening to music, karaoke, art studio projects, body movement therapy, reading groups, and watching films. Respites were mobile to serve people throughout the city in familiar places where they were most comfortable. ⁶

The work we describe below is about the dignity, creativity, and liberation discovered when there are possibilities for thriving (cf. Gupta, 2019; Hoffman et al., 2016; Robbins, 2016; Watkins & Schulman, 2008). In the next sections, we will offer perspectival accounts of our work at the respite regarding emergence, resistance, communitas, and bearing witness and briefly reflect on how this project has changed us.

Theories in Action at the MTR

Kelsey Long has done over 2 years of outreach to folks living on the streets for both Operation Safety Net (OSN) ⁹ and Bridge to the Mountains. ¹⁰ She was also the director of the MTR. Rachel completed her community internship at OSN in our community master’s program and is currently a doctoral student in our clinical psychology program.

Rachel recounts,

My engagement in this project complicated and problematized how I conceptualized “helping” those “in need.” In particular, I saw the ways in which altruism is a fallacy and that giving back is not being with. Week after week, sitting on a plastic chair behind a folding table of authority, assigned to gatekeep warmth and comfort, I witnessed bare survival. I felt, for the first time in my budding career, that what I had the privilege and agency to “give back” was not enough to give the people—evenly spaced on thin vinyl mats in this echoey gymnasium night after night—any more agency in their own lives. In fact, many of the services that I observed or participated in removed agency in service of order or control. Without question, the survival services provided were essential, but their insufficiency troubled me.

Kelsey offers similar reflections, as she remembers,

Any preconceived notions on my part, whether about the experience of homelessness, or what homelessness means to those who are homeless, or what I imagined homeless individuals might need or want or could use, was not really the point. Though our volunteer work included assigning basic necessities, such as socks, food, and a church basement floor to sleep on, there appeared to be something different and far more important that we were not offering.

Rachel and Kelsey helped in any way needed, but their primary task was to listen to folks, do some interviewing and observing, and help tell stories so as to inform and change the consciousness in the city. In what follows, we have extracted some text from Kelsey and Rachel’s ethnographies, which describe and reflect on their experience as bearing witness and related to the creation of the MTR.

Kelsey explains how the camps can be sites of resistance, Homeless camps, and tent cities are radical in this way. They offer the privacy and freedom that they are denied within the shelter system. Likewise, they offer a space wherein residents reside on equal footing.

Regarding the camps, and in thinking of communitas, Rachel tells us,

There was always a mix of new and old faces at this camp, but a core group really created a community there that seemed to facilitate thriving. In a way, the camp operated like a household in its structure and in the way that people took responsibility for one another, but with more fluidity in who was accepted as a member and how long/if they were expected to stay.

Can the respite borrow from the culture of encampments? Again, in thinking of communitas, Kelsey suggests,

At a shelter, there is no privacy. Those that utilize the space sleep on mats less than a foot away from each other. Once inside, one is surrounded by services workers, and constantly required to disclose personal information. In the shelter, one is always kept at the relational level of homeless/social worker. In order for us to host the environment that we want, I think that all of the volunteers should be people that want to interact with folks and contribute positively to this experience. People should feel safe here and not othered in any way that makes them feel like they are lesser than any volunteers.

Indeed, for Feldman, shelters “. . . persist in isolating and containing the homeless in bare life, to be kept alive, while stigmatizing them as helpless victims and damaged subjects” (p. 103). Rachel, regarding bearing witness, explains,

One of the things that bothers me most about shelters is how they separate families and partners. Spending the night together is one of the more intimate and comforting things a family can do. Yet, people who are homeless are denied such a comfort as if their homeless status negates their status as a partner/child/parent/etc.

Rachel tells us, volunteers were also approaching their tasks with different perspectives—some took a more “us vs. them” approach, while others treated the clients as equals.

Rachel goes on,

It was fun to form an assembly line to bring the blankets down because it was a rare moment of staff and consumers working together to solve a problem, but also making a game of it. In that moment, we were all on the same team, which is an uncommon feeling in this space.

The thriving witnessed at camps and at the shelter may be an emergent strategy disclosed at the respite—thriving happens, as communitas happens, when empowering possibilities are explored and opened up. For Rachel and Kelsey, there were possibilities that existed at the shelter that hinted toward what the respite might be like. ¹¹ And so, at the winter shelter, we began the first MTR event—a movie night in the women’s shelter section. Only a few people watched the film, Coco, but it was heartening to see staff and what the shelter calls “consumers” sitting together. When there, we met up with the good people from Bridge to the Mountains and hung out together during the set up. I (Bob) noticed some of the men hanging around in the hallway looking in on our set up. I spoke to one of them and he asked what we were doing. I explained and asked him if he thought the men would want to see a movie too. “Hell yes!” he exclaimed. A week or so later, we came back to the shelter to play a film for the men. It is a simple thing to do, play a movie, and part of an emergent strategy where these small acts reflect and potentially transform a system. Rachel describes,

We brought the equipment to play a movie tonight on the men’s floor—purchased a projector, downloaded Coming to America, and brought in snacks and water. As soon as they saw us setting up, two of the men volunteering to put out the mats and clean got very excited. One came and helped us pick the best spot on the wall to play it. The other stood in the back to let us know how the welcome screen looked from the back.

Rachel recounts an interaction with one of the people that night: I really need a movie tonight . . . Is this Coming to America? Oh my god it is. This is the funniest movie. Sadly, everything did not go entirely smoothly, as Rachel relates:

Everything was going well until we tried to play the actual movie. It just wouldn’t play. After about an hour and a half of struggle, we finally found a bootleg version on YouTube. The quality was lower than we wanted, and we were all disappointed, but that was all we had. I assumed people would be upset—mostly complaining about the quality of the video. To my surprise, however, none of the people were upset about it. In fact, many of them were thrilled to watch the movie once they realized what it was. They chuckled and told the people around them how much they liked this movie. The general mood was relaxed if not jovial, compared to how loud, hectic, and sometimes hostile it is. Even though it wasn’t what we hoped, playing this movie seemed to make a positive impact on this space.

Eventually, we partnered with The First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh. Reverends Tom Hall and Dan Turis welcomed us with open arms and offered their large basement area for events. ¹² Later, we partnered with the First Lutheran Church of Pittsburgh and Reverend Jennifer McCurry, and again, we were warmly welcomed. ¹³ For one of the respites, we had a volunteer DJ come in and play Motown music. Kelsey tells us,

As the event goes on, people seemed to relax more and more. Near the end of the night, during a Michael Jackson song, I look around and see that a small group of people have gotten up and are dancing with each other, really getting into it.

There were over 30 people at this respite event, and we bought pizza for everyone. Most other respites were lower in attendance, sometimes only five to eight people; other times, 15 to 20 came in.

One of the more popular events was board games and card playing as Kelsey describes:

At my table, we try to play dominos but cannot remember the rules. Eventually, we decide to play Uno instead. The game goes on for a long time and gets pretty heated. The game feels a lot like how a game between regular friends might feel. Dan and Hannah, and the social worker are playing with us and seem completely at ease interacting with the folks here. There is lighthearted trash talk, and everyone playing the game keeps playing cards that screw each other over. I appreciate the fact that the people there feel comfortable enough around us to do so and to keep trash talking.

Kelsey goes on,

I feel like having the time to sit down with friends and play a game is an aspect of thriving that is so simple yet may be inaccessible or seen as unnecessary experience for those staying outside or even those living low income.

We had art studios at the respite too. Kelsey relates,

During the art, some people are self-conscious about their own art, but the volunteers and some of the people in attendance reassure them that they are really good. One person says that they hate their painting when they finish it, but after a while it dries, and they look at their painting again deciding that they actually think it’s really cool.

We were careful that our choice of programming did not leave people out or put people off, so to speak. Kelsey explains,

While we are making art, I am aware that there are some people that do not seem to want to take part in it and some of them are sitting at tables far away from us. I notice that some of the volunteers go over to them to make them feel like they are still a part of our event. She continues, Another person is really proud of their painting—they usually don’t think that they are any good at art, but think that they were able to create something really cool this time. We leave them on a table for everyone to take with them another day when they’ve dried.

Upon reflection, Kelsey suggests,

I think this event is a really cool one that we should revisit if we continue the respite. Art is not typically a very accessible thing for people living outside or low income, so I think that providing people with a way to do it is a wonderful way to provide thriving. This event, or an art therapy event would be great for future respite ideas.

Kelsey continues,

As we leave, I get asked whether we will be doing the event again, and I tell them that we may try to do another one in the future. The event seemed to be one that people really liked. They had an opportunity to show off their talents, have fun, and let loose—an experience that I don’t feel those staying outside or in shelter housing living low-income have much of an opportunity to do.

Here, Rachel reflects on her experience and emergent strategies:

These acts of love, compassion, and expression—community created both in the real and the transient sense—that are highlighted in these story snippets are the unspoken reality of homelessness. When we ban displaced people and view them as subhuman, or maybe worse—invisible, we deny the reality that humans are human regardless of their dwelling choices or their level of participation in consumerism. In turn, society reveals that it truly values structure and maintenance of that structure over the complex and varied humans living within and adjacent to that structure.

We ran the thriving respite for approximately 2 years, and if not for the Covid-19 pandemic, we would be in operation now. In fact, Kelsey recounts,

Our summer regulars frequently ask about the students we had last semester and seem pretty bummed that they’re not doing it again. Many have excitedly told me that they’ve seen some of them around Downtown and stopped and said hey. The students from last semester seem to really have left a great impression and are greatly missed!

Our community has been supportive, including the Mayor’s office (Pittsburgh), Storyburgh.Org, the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, as well as 412 Food Rescue, and Bigburgh.com. We were invited on NPR, WESA 90.5 to discuss the respite.

To Continue Thriving

The MTR is a first step toward “sustaining habitats” as opposed to “isolating the individual homeless person for treatment and shelter” (Feldman, 2004, p. 148). Kelsey concludes, I feel that if we want our respite to be radical, we must be willing to go out of our way to be accommodating however we can, even if it is inconvenient for us. Rachel elucidates where we would like our work to go, and how we would like it to transform:

There are few, if any, spaces where the line between people who are displaced and home-dwelling people is blurred—where people can just be complex humans without a designation, an asterisk to indicate that their personhood is in question. Blurred spaces are ones that allow for thriving—for being seen as kind, loving, compassionate, expressive, cruel, unloving, boring—regardless of housing status as an arbitrary marker for being adequately human.

Indeed, for Arnold (2004), “Mutual humanity is recognized in people’s histories, their particularities, and their difference; not their physical need” (p. 170). Arnold (2004) calls for a widening conception of belonging which embraces a “multiplicity of identities of the city” (p. 172). Furthermore, Feldman (2004) suggests, “The denial of homeless placemaking activities and the attempt to disrupt these habits of dwelling [within the sheltering system] is common to both punitive policies targeting ‘disorder’ and therapeutic efforts to isolate and reform the homeless client” (p. 148). Feldman continues, “Attending to these cultural, political, and economic injustices means refusing the consignment of street dwellers to an invisible, shadowy, outlaw existence” and working to oppose identities created simply as “homeless bare life” (p. 148). Finally, for Arnold, the making of home and placemaking activities can only be successful if “market values” do not wholly define identity, ownership, home, and citizenship (p. 172).

It must be noted that any university itself operates under a neoliberal and corporate governing (Giroux, 2014; Readings, 1996). Rachel and Kelsey have been student activists working within a university-supported practicum. We have wanted to foster activist research at our university and connect it with appropriate theories. Our hope has been to embrace “. . . how the experience of solidarity and the relationships formed through activism can be instrumental in student’s resilience and resistance” (Karter et al., 2019). In their study, Karter et al. found that “hands on, local, and activist oriented learning experiences as well micro-subversive initiatives can ameliorate some of the students’ apathy” (p. 24). Therefore, we are not interested in activist work that merely fits within the neoliberal agenda of the university and wish to help empower students to do the kind of work we have presented herein.

Likewise, we are not interested in a respite that merely works within the dominant and prevailing systems created to help people to survive (and which are, at times, oppressive). We conclude that for Rachel and us all,

A true space for thriving and community must be accessible, attractive, and welcoming to all people without revealing housing status or modeling the metaphorical and physical borders that exist to victimize and violate displaced people outside of the space.