What makes a house a home? Through this context, how can we look at housing through the lens of homelessness and economic mobility? Also, how can we utilize media to represent lived experiences, to represent a community that is often viewed through a single lens that media has set up for us? All these questions are not easy to answer, but they can definitely be worked on with the right research and exploration. Through this creative engagement project, I hope to engage the community by sparking community engagement by providing a creative lens for the masses in looking at homelessness. How can we effectively engage the community through creative outlets and tell the story of these actual experiences of homelessness rather than what we usually see in the media?
Media is very important, according to Dr. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, who is the Coordinator and Instructor of Public History in the History Department at Rutgers University. She says, “Media gives us that window that allows us to look into other people’s experiences and that we look to media to give us context overall.” In fact, when conducting her own research for her book, Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic, Dr. O’Brassill-Kulfan focused on finding documents that told the first-person narrative of the lived experience and avoided documents written by government officials and authorities. Her method of research of utilizing first-person accounts of homelessness reflects the approach we should take when telling the narrative of housing through the lens of homelessness, rather than inflating what is already out there about it.
After doing some research, I have found many articles and journals about the effect media has on viewing homelessness. According to an article published in the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, titled “Unraveling the Social Construction of Homelessness”, Researcher Courtney Cronley discusses how homelessness “stems from a process of social construction in which, over time, differing groups have framed the definition and debate.” Homelessness is often viewed as a social construct rather than a lived experience, which allows people to create stereotypes and their own opinions about what causes it. Audrey Rose, a poet who writes about her personal experiences with homelessness, discusses the stereotype of homelessness in our interview and says, “…we get so used to [stereotypes] that we automatically judge people and we don’t remain open enough to imagine that there are other possibilities, other situations, and perhaps a whole lot more to the story that we don’t even know about.”
When we look to media coverage about homelessness, we often see the same image appear on the screen. Many news outlets think coverage about homelessness is limited to them showing images of people living on the streets in the midst of a busy sidewalk. For example, an article titled “Grand Slum: Homeless street camp blights city gateway” was published in Melbourne’s Herald Sun, talking about how a homeless camp, that was home to two dozen people, “shocked overseas visitors”. There was immediate criticism on the coverage on social media and organizations representing homelessness called for a shift of focus in news coverage regarding homelessness overall. Instead of focusing on showing images of people in the streets, why not focus on the lack of affordable housing and employment opportunities to provide for the ones in need?
Advocating for this focal shift in the media will be one of the goals I have for my final installation project. After interviewing Dr. O’Brassill-Kulfan and Audrey Rose, I thought about the most genuine way to present the material I have collected so far. I would like to utilize my passion for photography to create a narrative that could show homelessness through the lens of my camera, conveying to audiences a truthful perspective on the matter. Photography has the ability to portray emotions in ways journalism or words, even, might not be able to, and that is the essence of my creative outreach project. With Dr. O’Brassill-Kulfan’s advice in trying to tell the story of poverty from a firsthand, genuine point of view, and Audrey’s input on how I can effectively translate my research through a creative platform, I plan to capture, in photos, a story that tells the narrative of homelessness and housing.
