Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

Homeless assistance has frequently adhered to the "three hots and a cot" model, which prioritizes immediate material needs but may fail to address the political and social exclusion of people experiencing homelessness. In this study, Loehwing reconsiders typical characterizations of homelessness, citizenship, and democratic community through unconventional approaches to homeless advocacy and assistance.
While conventional homeless advocacy rhetoric establishes the urgency of homeless suffering, it also implicitly invites housed publics to understand homelessness as a state of abnormality that destines the individuals suffering it to life outside the civic body. In contrast, Loehwing focuses on atypical models of homeless advocacy: the meal-sharing initiatives of Food Not Bombs, the international competition of the Homeless World Cup, and the annual Homeless Persons' Memorial Day campaign. She argues that these modes of unconventional homeless advocacy provide rhetorical exemplars of a type of inclusive and empowering civic discourse that is missing from conventional homeless advocacy and may be indispensable for overcoming homeless marginalization and exclusion in contemporary democratic culture.
Loehwing's interrogation of homeless advocacy rhetorics demonstrates how discursive practices shape democratic culture and how they may provide a potential civic remedy to the harms of disenfranchisement, discrimination, and displacement. This book will be welcomed by scholars whose work focuses on the intersections of democratic theory and rhetorical and civic studies, as well as by homelessness advocacy groups.

About the author

Melanie Loehwing is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Mississippi State University.

Summary

A rhetorical analysis of conventional and unconventional models of homeless advocacy that positions each in relation to perennial anxieties about citizens’ abilities to fulfill democratic obligations.

Product details

• Authors: Melanie Loehwing, Melanie (Mississippi State University) Loehwing
• Publisher: University Presses
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 05.10.2018
• EAN: 9780271082158
• ISBN: 978-0-271-08215-8
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 229 mm x 229 mm
• Weight: 145 g
• Series: Rhetoric and Democratic Delibe; Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative linguistics; Social sciences, law, business > Media, communication > Communication science; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Poverty & Homelessness, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Civics & Citizenship, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Policy, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Rhetoric, Poverty & unemployment, Communication Studies, Civil rights & citizenship, Human rights, civil rights, Semantics, discourse analysis, stylistics, Housing & homelessness, Poverty and precarity, Housing and homelessness, Semantics, discourse analysis, etc