Doctoral Dissertation Research: Youth Homelessness: Street Kids in the Urban South

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Youth Homelessness: Street Kids in the Urban SouthLGBTQ youth are estimated to make up at least 40 percent of the youth homeless population in the United States, despite being only about 5-8 percent of the U.S. youth population. In conducting interviews and ethnographic field research, this study examines how LGBTQ become homeless, their specific needs, and their interactions with other people as being both LGBTQ and homeless. Through uncovering the day-to-day experiences and distinct issues affecting LGBTQ homeless youth, this project will examine how gender and sexuality within the contexts of poverty affect how young people become and experience homelessness. This research also adds a new spatial context - the urban South - to the literature on LGBTQ people more generally. The "new homelessness" is a visible marker of the poverty and growing income inequality that has followed the neoliberal economic re-structuring of society. Little research examines how larger social forces that marginalize LGBTQ people may also contribute to the new homelessness, in particular, the new youth homelessness. This gap is especially critical because LGBTQ homeless youth disproportionately make up the youth homeless population in the United States. In conducting ethnographic fieldwork at a homeless youth drop-in center and at a LGBTQ youth homeless shelter, this study asks about the particular processes associated with youth homelessness, gender, and sexuality today. Compared to the Northeast, West coast, and Midwest where most studies on LGBTQ life take place, this study occurs in a Southern state where there are less favorable views of LGBTQ civil rights, and a lack of protections for LGBTQ people in the workplace, in housing, or in other accommodations. This lack of support for LGBTQ and low-income people provides an under-examined, social and economic climate in which to study youth homelessness, gender and sexuality in the urban South.