Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco

Author:   Teresa Gowan
Publisher:   University of Minnesota Press
ISBN:  

9780816648696


Pages:   368
Publication Date:   28 July 2010
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you.

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Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco


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Overview

Winner of the 2011 Robert Park Award for the Best Book in Community and Urban Sociology, American Sociological Association, 2011 Co-winner of the 2011 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in the Sociology of Culture, American Sociological Association, 2011 When homelessness reemerged in American cities during the 1980s at levels not seen since the Great Depression, it initially provoked shock and outrage. Within a few years, however, what had been perceived as a national crisis came to be seen as a nuisance, with early sympathies for the plight of the homeless giving way to compassion fatigue and then condemnation. Debates around the problem of homelessness—often set in terms of sin, sickness, and the failure of the social system—have come to profoundly shape how homeless people survive and make sense of their plights. In Hobos, Hustlers, and BackslidersDrawing on five years of fieldwork, this powerful ethnography of men living on the streets of the most liberal city in America, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders, makes clear that the way we talk about issues of extreme poverty has real consequences for how we address this problem—and for the homeless themselves.

Full Product Details

Author:   Teresa Gowan
Publisher:   University of Minnesota Press
Imprint:   University of Minnesota Press
Dimensions:   Width: 14.00cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 21.60cm
Weight:   0.544kg
ISBN:  

9780816648696


ISBN 10:   0816648697
Pages:   368
Publication Date:   28 July 2010
Audience:   General/trade ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments, Introduction: Sin, Sickness, and the System, Part I. Backstories, 1. Urban Ethnography beyond the Culture Wars, 2. Managing Homelessness in the United States, Part II. The Street Watch Out San Francisco! Ain’t Gonna Get No Peace, 3. Moorings Some Other Kind of Life, 4. Word on the Street No One Loves a Loser, 5. The New Hobos, Part III. Rabble Management Like I Need More Drugs in My Life?, 6. The Homeless Archipelago A Little Room for Myself, 7. The Old Runaround: Class Cleansing in San Francisco The Road to Nowheresville, Conclusion, Notes, Bibliography, Index

Reviews

<p> Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders is spectacular ethnography, fearlessly conducted by a 'small, white English woman' among homeless men in San Francisco's roughest neighborhoods. The big surprise is not the hostility of the police or the shortage of services, but the determination of so many of these men to build a career out of recycling trash. Gowan's respect for her subjects and her willingness to pitch in with the dirtiest of work-dumpster diving, for example-make this a gripping read as well as a powerful call to reassess how America treats its most despised and marginal people. --Barbara Ehrenreich


Author Information

Teresa Gowan is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota.

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