No Place Like Home: Care, Community, and Criminalization of Homelessness in Kansas
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic the city of Topeka, Kansas has seen a significant increase in the number of unhoused people, many of whom live in improvised housing along the Kansas river that runs through the city. In response, the local Community Mental Health Center (CMHC) and the Topeka Rescue Mission, a Christian charity and Topeka’s sole shelter operator, expanded homeless outreach services using federal COVID-19 funding.This led to the establishment of dedicated outreach teams and the Mobile Access Partnership (MAP), a biweekly event meant to address unhoused Topekans’ basic needs and connect them to social services. Simultaneously, Topeka city government has taken steps to criminalize homelessness, passing a targeted anti-camping ordinance in 2019 and dramatically expanding its scope starting November 17, 2023. While homelessness and struggles for housing justice in America’s major cities have received much attention in contemporary academic and public discourse, smaller cities like Topeka where housing has historically been more affordable have been understudied.
This project works to bring ethnographic attention to the lives of contemporary unhoused people living in an academically overlooked and undertheorized community in the heart of the Midwest, foregrounding the precarity of everyday life and the relationships, communities, and lives built despite it. I examine strategies unhoused Topekans use to ensure social and material subsistence and the collective structural processes that make survival and sociality more difficult. My work looks at how unhoused people relate to one another, to their housed neighbors, to our broader communities, and to the environment. I work to ground conversations on worsening social inequality in the United States, and to challenge the alarming growth of punitive public policy, technologies, and profitable markets for policing extreme poverty and homelessness.
Finally, by centering the experiences of unhoused people in “flyover country,” I question the arbitrariness of red state/blue state regionalization to identify future opportunities for collective mobilization for housing justice regardless of state and city border.
Over the past several months, I have been spending time intermittently with unhoused Topekans and service providers, volunteering on street outreach teams and at the Mobile Access Partnership (MAP). This has permitted me to establish rapport with key interlocutors necessary for the implementation of more intensive methods. On my original grant application, I discussed the implementation of three focus groups with unhoused Topekans to create spaces to theorize present material and social conditions, imagine future possibility, and make asks of the greater Topeka community. I intend to use the fellowship funds for this purpose, offsetting air travel costs to return to my fieldsite from Los Angeles and use remaining funds to compensate focus group participants. Upon receiving the fellowship, I notified local partners with whom I have been working and have scheduled a two-hour meeting on November 13, 2023 to discuss these plans and receive approval for using MAP events to recruit participants. Once this approval is obtained, I will submit for IRB approval from my home institution, aiming to begin participant recruitment and focus group in late January and/or February 2024.