Homeless and Media Use: Disconnectivity Divide, Affective Infrastructuring and #Carlife

MKV/DigiTrans Higher Seminar with Maren Hartmann, Berlin University of the Arts

Homelessness has grown in recent years, in Europe generally, but also in Sweden. The housing crisis, the decline of the welfare states, wars and other factors contribute to this rise. At the same time, awareness has also risen. The pandemic, in all its highly problematic aspects for the homeless, managed to at least temporarily put a spotlight on those people who could not simply 'stay home.' Generally, European policies to end homelessness by 2030 have given rise to country-specific policy measures. This presentation will embed itself within this ambivalent situation. It will focus, however, on the media use of roofless people. The presentation will present outcomes of a three-year research project based in Berlin. Therein, an ethnography in the homeless sector was combined with a smartphone handout and a survey. Next to the outcomes of the project, the presentation will focus on the implications – both on the theoretical and the policy level. How do these findings connect to (and partly contradict) the recently much debated question of disconnectivity? Affective infrastructuring is one attempt to capture the ambivalence of both the roofless context and media use therein. Lastly, a brief glimpse of ongoing work on the (self-)representation of homelessness online will be given.