Between Tactics and Affect, Non-place and Place: A Visual Analysis of the Everyday Geography of Homeless People

Abstract

Abstract:The article uses photovoice to explore the everyday geography of homelessness and its affective dimension. We focus on two aspects of the everyday geography captured by photovoice: (1) movement in space and (2) the performativity of heterotopic places. The aim is to understand how the research partners as actors (re)present and (re)construct their everyday geography by visual means and how they relate to it affectively (or otherwise). Photovoice is a suitable method for this type of research as it has been used across the social sciences and especially in action research as a productive tool that allows people to document and refl ect on their everyday life, their strengths, and their concerns, and to communicate all this effectively to the wider public. In this article, we critically discuss photovoice and argue that besides its action potential, it can also be used to generate rich visual research data. We present data collected from photovoice research on homeless people in Prague and Pilsen, two cities in the Czech Republic, and conduct formal analytical and hermeneutic analyses of the data. The photographs we obtained reveal the movement of our research partners -the homeless -in space and their relationship to different places and the people in them. In general, people were the most frequently photographed theme. The research revealed that social relations are the most important aspect in the creation and production of places in cities. Several factors, most importantly age, infl uence the extent to which social relations play this role.