Jigsaw

This riveting book examines the historical, economic, and political conditions which have shaped homelessness today. Drawing on interviews with 150 young people, the author analyses the causes and consequences of youth homelessness, at the same time as indicating their implications for the politics of youth citizenship. She argues that a significant number of homeless young adults have had their worlds so violently fractured by the effects of housing scarcity, unemployment and cuts in welfare, that attempts to survive and repair their shattered lives necessarily involve a re-ordering of political, moral and economic possibilities. The whole book constitutes a Jigsaw wherein Pat Carlen shows how today's youth homelessness is a very twentieth century production, strangely caught in the tensions between late-modern systems of welfare-regulation, postmodern creativities of identity risk and reflexivity, and pre-modern fears about the wanderer, the traveller, the mendicant - and all those others who live where they cannot be addressed.