Research

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

Click the link to access the article through ResearchGate, or feel free to contact me for a copy.

Speer, J. (2018). Urban makeovers, homeless encampments, and the aesthetics of displacement. Social and Cultural Geography, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2018.1509115.

Hennigan, B. and Speer, J. (2018). Compassionate revanchism: The blurry geography of homelessness in the USA. Urban Studies, DOI: 10.1177/0042098018762012.

Speer, J. (2018). The rise of the tent ward: Homeless camps in the era of mass incarceration. Political Geography. 62: 160-169.

Speer, J. (2017). “It’s not like your home”: Homeless encampments, housing projects, and the struggle over domestic space. Antipode. 49(2): 517-535.

Speer, J. (2016). The right to infrastructure: A struggle for sanitation in Fresno, California homeless encampments. Urban Geography. 37(7): 1049-1069.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research examines struggles over urban and domestic space at the margins of housed society. Prior to becoming an academic, I provided legal representation to clients who cycled in and out of housing. From this work, I became interested in the connections between homelessness and housing policy. As a geographer, my research engages political economic, social, and feminist approaches to urban inequality to reveal how precariously housed and homeless communities contest the dynamics of urban housing and mainstream ideologies of domesticity.

The urban politics of informal housing

In 2013, I conducted fieldwork in Fresno, California, a city that has repeatedly bulldozed some of the largest homeless encampments in the nation. Drawing from detailed ethnographic observations, 24 interviews with homeless people and officials, and archival analysis of newspapers and policy reports over two decades, I wrote a 250-page master’s thesis that engages the theories of Henri Lefebvre and geographic literature on neoliberal cities, sanitation, home, and homelessness. I argue that in creating informal homes, homeless people in Fresno asserted their right to the city and challenged the production of urban capitalist space and hegemonic norms of domestic life. I further show how neoliberal modes of urban revitalization led to the commodification of the downtown landscape and the violent removal of encampments, and how homeless campers resisted evictions and framed urban space as a right shared by all residents.

Multiple articles have emerged from this research. In a 2016 Antipode article, I argued that homeless Fresnans often characterized encampments as home spaces and rejected surveilled and isolating housing projects and shelters. This revealed that anti-homeless laws not only police public space, they also police the meaning of home. My work in Fresno sparked the questions from which my dissertation emerged, as homeless campers saw resistance as a struggle for self-representation in the face of overwhelming ideological exclusion. These insights led me to examine the politics of representation in relation to homelessness, housing, and conceptions of the home.

Representing home from the margins of housed society

My dissertation, entitled Losing home: Housing, displacement, and the American Dream, reveals that homeless people’s life narratives are a central yet overlooked theoretical source for challenging the exclusion of homeless voices and critiquing the violence and exploitation of contemporary urban housing and domesticity. Memoirs of homelessness have been widely published over the last several decades and in recent years, activists across the country have created homeless oral history archives as forums for homeless voices to be heard. These largely unexamined sources provide fertile ground for analyzing how people represent home and housing from the perspective of homelessness. For this project, I compiled and surveyed a comprehensive collection of more than two hundred memoirs of contemporary homelessness, many of which are self-published and difficult to obtain. I also visited six homeless oral history archives in cities across the nation, and reviewed several hundred oral histories recorded over the past decade.

My unique research methodology—reading a large dataset of literature and testimony using qualitative analysis—advances both feminist and postcolonial theories of knowledge production and representation. I am currently developing articles examining the epistemological aspects of my work, and revising my dissertation into a book that intervenes in American studies, urban geography, and feminist political economy. My analysis of life narratives reveals how the “American dream” of national belonging is bound up not only in visions of homeownership, but in historically racialised and gendered processes of displacement. Many homeless thinkers critique the displacements caused by gentrification, predatory lending, and discriminatory public housing, and frame homeless people in the US as noncitizens who are part of a broader global community of racially displaced people. They further show how ideologies of domesticity reinforce economic dependence, such that women and LGBT youth often face homelessness upon escaping domestic violence. My book project focuses on how the experience of displacement sheds light on two central crises of American housing: the racist exploitation of the housing market, and the hetero-patriarchal violence of domesticity. In turn, I will emphasize the historical specificity of American housing as deeply bound up in American national identity.