Crack Method: Community, Mutual Aid, and Appropriation in Washington D.C.’s Homeless Encampments

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Capitalism’s Cracks" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Using a methodology developed within Capitalism’s cracks I weave together the past, present and future realties of Washington D.C.’s street homeless communities. The mutual aid developed within these communities has proven to reproduce alternative social relations. Appropriating, rather then consuming, the waste spaces and resources of our productive systems, homeless encampments stand in stark contrast to our normative understandings of daily life. Using data from a 16-month ethnography of homeless encampments in the NoMa neighborhood of DC I explore how 30-60 people live rent free in one of these fastest developing areas in the United States where rents start around $2,000. My research, in line with the spoken testimony of my homeless collaborators, provides little hope for ‘ending homeless’. Rather, by contextualizing homelessness as an intrinsic contradiction of capital accumulation, I search for strategies and tactics that can help us keep up with the growing mess we find ourselves in.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Historical Archaeology of Capitalism’s Cracks

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 269