Intersectional Perspectives on Homelessness and Social Work

This chapter draws on Winker and Degele’s (Eur J Women’s Stud 18(1):51–66, 2011) multilevel intersectional analysis framework to discuss social policy and social work responses to homelessness. This multilayered intersectional analysis of homelessness examines institutionalised social structures, identity constructions, and symbolic policy representations to enhance understandings about overlapping social inequalities in welfare states, social policymaking processes, and social work practice and research. Homeless identities are discursively and symbolically constructed, shaping institutionalised and systemic barriers in social work and homelessness. Policy identity categories, inclusionary and exclusionary citizenship, and transnational welfare responses exist within unequal power relations and intersecting global and local social inequalities. The chapter argues that concepts of relational identity and intersectionality are useful for interrogating social constructions of homelessness and homeless people. However, policy processes often reproduce rather than challenge intersecting inequalities, and this needs to be made visible.