5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Historically, women’s and gender diverse people’s experiences have been missing from homelessness research. Although this is changing, gender-neutral representations of homelessness persist. The endurance of gender neutrality, compounded by disregard of coexisting intersectional oppressions, in homelessness research, policy and the public imagination, perpetuates injustice through the exclusion of those already exceedingly marginalised. This session aims to interrogate the structural, social, political and cultural dimensions of homelessness through a gendered and intersectional lens. Expanding our knowledge of what constitutes homelessness, and who can experience it, allows us to question restrictive assumptions. Papers are invited that theoretically and empirically engage with hidden and emerging experiences and constructions of homelessness. By challenging static understandings of gender and homelessness through critical sociological frameworks such as feminism, queer and anti-racist theories, postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism, the shared and disparate aspects of this global phenomenon can be identified and thereby represented in future policy, practice and advocacy.