The hopeful labour of begging – Homeless people’s struggles for a better life in Paris
Authors
Publication Date
2021Journal Title
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
ISSN
0263-7758
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Volume
39
Issue
5
Pages
792-809
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Lenhard, J. (2021). The hopeful labour of begging – Homeless people’s struggles for a better life in Paris. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39 (5), 792-809. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758211005443
Abstract
<jats:p>Both in public imagination and scholarship, begging is often associated with passivity, waiting, inactivity and as such defined as the opposite of ‘real work’. During two years of fieldwork with people sleeping rough in Paris, I observed my informants to the contrary describe begging as their occupation. In this paper, I present an ethnographically grounded argument that the people experiencing homelessness I accompanied over the course of two years experienced begging as labour which involved constructing and supporting emotional narratives of neediness, deservingness and personal connections in scripts, stories and hustles. My interlocutors often understood this labour to be a hopeful one, one that structured their day (and thoughts) but also one that enabled their projets de vies, their struggles into the future. In the wake of overwhelming suffering and structural violence, I observed begging not only a short-term fix for consumption but also as keeping the future open – the more long-term future of eventually leaving the street behind.</jats:p>
Keywords
Begging, labour, homelessness, hope, future
Identifiers
10.1177_02637758211005443
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758211005443
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/329723
Rights
Embargo: ends 2021-04-08
Licence:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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