Canadian homeless mobilities: relational perspectives on At Home/Chez Soi participants’ interurban migrations

Abstract

This thesis examines the mobility patterns of 613 participants from the At Home/Chez Soi Research Demonstration Project on Mental Health and Homelessness who were surveyed in five Canadian cities (Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montréal, and Moncton). Participants’ mobility histories are treated as life courses: visualized using a GIS spatiotemporal analysis and complemented by examining their self-described reasons for movement (n=1,750). I contend that homeless mobilities are complex, entangled, and multiple.

To better understand these mobilities, I apply relational theoretical perspectives to literature from the mobilities turn. I conceptualize mobility as composed of the relations between various actors. These relations coordinate amidst social differences, histories, and orderings of power. Together, actors and the relations between them, become more than the sum of their parts. To see mobility relationally, is to say that mobilities have emergent properties that reproduce, deepen, or ameliorate marginalization for those experiencing homelessness.

I identify a series of actors and their relations composing homeless mobilities via time-space mapping, descriptive statistics, and the exploratory coding of survey data. I conclude by detailing a relational view of homeless mobilities while suggesting that expulsion is one emergent property of this system.