Abstract:
In this paper I draw together key insights from my last five years of work on the issue
of ongoing or persistent homelessness, Focusing in particular on Australian Housing
and Urban Research Institute (AHlURI) research carried out with homeless people
with mentaL disorders in 2002/3, I attempt to articulate my understanding of the key
drivers of 'iterative' or repeated homelessness, While acknowledging the central role
structural or social exclusion plays in the maintenance of ongoing vulnerability to
homelessness, I re-work this notion of vulnerability to also include the enduring
embodied impacts of cumulative trauma.
Drawing on accommodation biography data from the AHURI project and from my
research work more generally, I build an argument about the need to understand the
ways in which structural vulnerability. translates into lived chronic crisis, and the ways
in which the cumulative impact of such crisis deeply affects individual's capacities to
sustain housing and housing relationships, My end position is that a concept of
vulnerability which can bridge equally sophisticated accounts of the operation of
social exclusion and the operation of grief and trauma in the lives of those
expenencing ongoing homelessness opens constructive questions about the ways in
which homelessness is understood and responded to.
