Homelessness, empowerment and self-reliance in Scotland and Ireland: the impact of legal rights to housing for homeless people

AbstractThis paper explores the impact of legal rights to housing for homeless people, focusing on the capacity of such rights to ‘empower’ those experiencing homelessness. Lukes’ (2005) three-dimensional view of power, complemented by Bourdieu's (1972) concept of ‘habitus’, is used to distinguish between conceptualisations of empowerment. A distinction is drawn between ‘traditional’ understandings of empowerment, which focus on people's capacity to realise their ‘subjective interests’, and on understandings that foreground ‘real interests’. These latter ‘radical’ perspectives direct attention to people's ‘habitus’ – their internalised dispositions to perceive situations and act in particular ways. Empirically, the paper draws on a qualitative comparison of approaches to homelessness in Scotland and Ireland. Whereas in Scotland virtually all those who are homeless now have a legal right to settled accommodation, Ireland has rejected such a ‘legalistic’ approach, pursuing a consensus driven ‘social partnership’ model. Based on primary research with national experts, service providers and homeless single men in both countries, it is argued that legal rights can effectively empower homeless people. These findings call into question popular and political understandings of the relationship between legal welfare rights and self-reliance.</jats:p

Modern English and American drama as it illustrates the modern social viewpoint

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

The limits of localism: a decade of disaster on homelessness in England

The rhetoric and practice of localism has attracted significant support within both political and academic circles in the UK in recent years. However, it is the contention of this article that there are, or should be, limits to localism as applied to the basic citizenship rights of vulnerable people. Drawing on a ten-year, mixed-methods study, we use the example of sharply rising homelessness in England to illustrate our argument that localist policymaking has an intrinsic tendency to disadvantage socially marginalised groups. While we acknowledge the central role played by austerity in driving up homelessness over the past decade, we advance the case that the post-2010 localist agenda of successive UK governments has also had an independent and malign effect. At the very least, we seek to demonstrate that localism cannot be viewed as a taken-for-granted progressive model, with centralism (that is, the consistent implementation of a policy across a whole country) also perfectly defensible on progressive grounds in relevant circumstances