Homelessness, Embodiment and School Disengagement: A Critical Perspective

The proposed paper critically examines the nexus between homelessness, embodiment, and stigma and their impact on youth engagement in schools in the Canadian context. Moving beyond research approaches that focus on homelessness as an individualized occurrence or through a political economy framework of homelessness, this project focuses on the embodied subjectivity of homeless youth as a means to explore their experiences in and outside the classroom. Drawing on feminist-inspired intersectional and embodied analysis of homelessness, the paper considers homeless youth as knowledge-producers, allowing for the emergence of alternative, experience-based understandings of homelessness and schooling to counter existing approaches informed primarily by male, cis-gendered perspectives. These experiences in turn are examined through the lens of interlocking systems of domination that schools reproduce, foregrounding what ideologies and orientations are adopted by schools and educators, and how they may be at odds with the lived experience of homeless youth. To illustrate this line of argument, the paper considers the case of a group of homeless youth’s experiences with schooling in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada