About this Event
On November 6, the School of Cities will host a talk by PhD candidate Benjamin Owens entitled Shelter Geographies at Work: Governance, Multidimensional Insecurity, and Possibility in the Lifeworlds of Unhoused Youth in Toronto. The talk was awarded the Jonathan and Erin Gouveia Fellowship.
Presentation description
Consistent with Canada’s marketized approach to housing, young people experiencing homelessness in Toronto are frequently expected to work to generate income and transition to independent housing. This, despite a plurality of barriers to accessing sustainable, remunerative employment in an increasingly precarious labour market, as well as popular and scholarly imaginaries of unhoused young people as passive recipients of top-down institutional supports. Building on extensive fieldwork and interviews with unhoused youth in Toronto, this presentation develops a multidimensional theory of precarity to understand the role of ‘work’ in young people’s lives: as a site of governance, as a political-economic domain intimately tied to experiences of housing and social supports, and as a prefigurative site of possibility for a more just urban future. In so doing, the presentation advances scholarship on precarity and urban inequality, while also developing recommendations for relational responses to youth homelessness grounded in the experiences and practices of young people themselves.
Speaker
Benjamin Owens, PhD candidate, Department of Geography & Planning, the University of Toronto
Event venue & nearby stays
Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship, School of Cities , Suite 853, 55 Saint George Street, Toronto, Canada
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