Summary Having first situated emotions within a broader theoretical context, this paper considers the benefits and the drawbacks of discussing emotions in accounts of the research process. The paper goes on to provide a personal account of my emotional response to conducting research in the West End of Newcastle, before concluding with some suggestions as to ways of taking the debate forward.

This paper re ects on ethical issues raised in research with homeless people in rural areas. It argues that the signi cant embracing of dialogic and re exive approaches to social research is likely to render standard approaches to ethical research practice increasingly complex and open to negotiation. Diary commentaries from different individuals in the research team are used to present self-re exive accounts of the ethical complexities and dilemmas encountered in offering explanations of the validity of the research, in carrying out ethnographic encounters with homeless people and in producing and evaluating the outputs of research. Re exivity does not dissolve ethical tensions, but opens up possibilities for new ethical and moral maps with which to explore ethical terrains more appropriately and more honestly. Researching Homeless People… no need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Rewriting you, I write myself anew (hooks, 1990, pp. 151-152). This paper draws on the experiences of the authors in undertaking research on homelessness in rural England, and more particularly in encountering homeless people as an integral part of that research. Amongst the objectives of our work was to contribute new understandings of how and why homelessness occurs in rural areas, and of how homelessness is experienced differently across the spectrum of homeless people in those areas. We also sought to develop suitable ethnographic research techniques which permit a deeper understanding of the coping strategies employed by homeless people in rural areas. In all aspects of this research we have found ourselves involved with issues and arguments about the ethics of researching the 'other'. Before starting, we had discussed

No abstract

In this paper we discuss the apparent failure to couple together the constructs of ‘rurality’ and ‘homelessness’, and propose a critical deconstruction of this noncoupling. Three principal lines of arguments are employed. First, there are a range of physical and material reasons why rural and urban spaces have varying qualities for hiding or revealing homeless people, and why the embodied experiences of homelessness have varying geographies. Second, there are a series of obstacles that exist within the practices, thoughts, and discourses of rural dwellers themselves, which lead them to deny that homelessness exists in their place. Third, normalised conceptualisations about rurality and homelessness often serve to separate the two concepts, and contribute to the assumption that homelessness is an urban phenomenon, which is rendered invisible in rural space. In short, homelessness may be conceptualised as being ‘out-of-place’ in the purified spaces of rurality, and the imaginary geographies of rurality and homelessness become transformed into everyday practices and actions relating to what people actually do in and about rural places. This critical deconstruction will be important for any attempts to recouple homelessness and rurality in the understandings and actions of policymakers.

In this paper we discuss the importance of ‘partnership’ and ‘policy networks’ in the new contemporary governance of rural areas. We use these notions to contextualize the representation of, and policy response to the particular issue of homelessness in the rural service centre of Taunton in Somerset. Here particular partnership networks have been brokered by the local authority which bring together a wide range of business, voluntary and community interests with a stake in the homelessness issue. Strong pre‐existing discourses of homelessness in Taunton characterize the issue as one of a town centre problem of ‘beggars, vagrants and drunks’. We offer evidence from the local press to suggest that these discourses have been persistently peddled by particular interests in the town. New forms of partnership were inevitably embroiled with the pursuit of these existing discourses, and contrary voices were unable to redefine existing social relations within policy networks. The evidence from Taunton suggests that where partnership merely involves attempts to repackage existing resources, it seems unlikely that it will fulfil some of the more optimistic claims for a more pluralist form of governance in the local arena.