Disgusting Things: How Disgust Shapes Contemporary Homeless Materialities

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Poverty And Plenty In The North", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Disgust is experienced as a “gut reaction” against something (an ambiguous object) mediated through sensory experience, typically smell, touch, and sight. It is an affect that is materially grounded and results in the need to create a boundary, distance, between “self” and the object that elicits the response. While working as a contemporary archaeologist in homeless encampments over the past 15 years, I began to recognize that disgust was rooted in how processes of social exclusion materialized and formed a distinctive homeless landscape. In this presentation, I am going to discuss types of objects and practices that elicit a disgust response within the materiality of the homeless encampments I studied in New York and Indianapolis, and the social habits that have formed around those objects. The objective is to identify the grounds upon which disgust is articulated and the effects it has had on homelessness in the United States.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Poverty And Plenty In The North   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow