Teresa Gowan
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2003 University of California Berkley
Room 1080 Social Sciences
tel.: 612-626-1863
email: tgowan@umn.edu
Interest Areas
Urban Sociology, Ethnography, Poverty and Inequality, Deviance and Social Control.
Current Research
At present I am finishing up a book called Sin, Sickness, and the System: Discourse and Homelessness in San Francisco and St. Louis. This work draws on five years of ethnographic fieldwork to investigate the social formation of “homelessness” among middle-aged men, who comprise the majority of the street homeless in the United States. I make the case that beliefs about the causes, nature, and potential solutions of the problem of homelessness can be usefully separated out into three broad discourses, each of which extend both "down" into street culture and "up" into social policy and the public sphere. The manuscript explores how notions of criminality, pathology, and systemic dysfunction get reworked on the street, both in what people say and what they do. It also shows how homelessness has become a key arena for post-Reagan poverty policy contemporary social policy, one which typifies highlights both the rejection of the concept of social entitlement in favour of individualized and highly medicalized interventions, and a corresponding return to punishment, surveillance, and exclusion as the dominant modes of social cohesion and control.
I have also started working on a new project with street musicians in Western Europe and the U.S., focusing on the question of if and how working as a street musician, or “busker,” has been affected by the return of large-scale street homelessness and begging. One hypothesis is that street musicians outside of a handful of high-profile (and often highly-regulated) “spots” may have lost status in the eyes of both their audience and officials concerned with public order. So far the research indicates that the street music in large cities has become more concentrated among the homeless and very poor than it was in the 1970s and '80s.
Recent Publications
“The Exclusion/Punishment Nexus: How Imprisonment Leads to Homelessness and Back Again.” 2002. Ethnography, 3(4): 500-535.
“San Francisco’s Homeless Recyclers.” 2001. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 45: 105-113.
Preface to Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World, with M. Burawoy, et al. 2000. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
“Excavating Globalization from Street Level: Homeless Men Recycle Their Pasts.” 2000. Pp 74-104 in Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World, with M. Burawoy, et al. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.