- Final Abstract: In no more than 150 words, provide the abstract for your final project.
Due April 24
This project aims to understand the ways in which deviancy is constructed historically towards homeless individuals through a neoliberal framework. It traces homelessness from the pre-modern capitalist society, throughout the late nineteenth-century, into the Great Depression, as well as from the 1970s until the present to understand the ways in which homeless people are perceived and treated under the deserving-underserving paradigm, living in the shadows of rising neoliberalism. This project further examines the ways in which homeless individuals become targets of greater structural forces from increased privatization, gentrification, and profit-seeking governments that aim to eliminate homelessness through criminalization and medicalization as opposed to addressing the core structural issues at hand. Using a case study in Portland, ME, this project further contextualizes the ways in which governments and industrialists perceive homelessness, in the construction of deviancy and criminalization that further perpetuates poverty and homelessness.