Grief and love: Responses to death and disjuncture in homelessness research and practice

Responses to homelessness in Canada have been paternalistic, charity-based, and individualized, underpinned by capitalist and colonial ideologies that blame individuals for their own precarity. Increasingly, research has become a player in shifting responses to homelessness, with reforms—at times supported by federal, provincial, or municipal governments--increasingly purporting to support solutions to housing precarity. In housing systems, these shifts maintain an appeal to the State as responsible for addressing housing insecurity. Poison drug supplies and housing precarity intersect to cause loss, grief, and death. Compounding forms of violence in the healthcare system and judicial system shape the lives and deaths of those navigating homelessness, particularly those who simultaneously navigate racism, transphobia, poverty, and ableism. Despite the shortcomings of State responses to homelessness, people have long been mobilizing to take care of one another within social systems that, at best, are negligent, and at worst are active forces in their deaths. This article explores what radical care, in tandem with abolitionist and anarchist methods and aims, can afford those of us who are deeply grieving. This paper presents a review of literature highlighting connections between systemic causes and the invisibilization of grief in homelessness work. I explore these in conversation with (auto)ethnographic inquiry, to highlight what communities are actively doingβ, even as we are constantly trying to keep each other alive. I ask how we can continue to foster radical care and imagination for dismantling systems that kill our communities, while working in, around, and outside of them. I explore the ways that solidarity building and love—for those we work alongside as well as those we have lost—can be a way to learn and enact new spaces of home and health.