changing the narrative:
homelessness in portland
My name is Meagan Peckover. As a student of French and Linguistics, it has been my privilege to study and explore language in many forms during my time at Portland State University. For this, my final term, I partnered with Applied Linguistics faculty member Janet Cowal to do Critical Discourse Analysis surrounding narratives about homelessness in the Portland area.
where we started
Photos and statistics presented in this section are from, and belong to, the City of Portland "Homelessness Toolkit" website. Find it here
in portland
In Portland, you will often hear people talk about the overwhelming nature of "the homelessness problem" in the city (I put this in quotation marks because couching something as a problem already creates a certain narrative). It’s easy to understand why Portlanders feel this way. But if we take a step back, we can see that this kind of language is part of what is perpetuating the feeling of crisis. We focus on crime, substance abuse, and mental illness. We look at statistics—we don’t look at people. We focus on what led people to be on the streets—their pasts –and not who they are and who they might be. I have never personally experienced homelessness which means that I do not share lived experience with this community, but I do share space, and what I hope to draw out of this project—the humanity of homeless individuals—is just another thing that we share.
My project this summer is to examine the ways that we present/view/participate in the homelessness dialogue in Portland, using Critical Discourse Analysis. I was born and raised in the Portland Metro Area and have watched the city expand and stretch rapidly in the last few years, but the fact that we have a population living on the street is something that has never changed in all the time I’ve been here. Though I was largely sheltered from the reality of homelessness as a child in NE Portland and then as a teenager in a rural community, it was inescapable once I started attending PSU. My first few terms were full of encounters with people asking for money—which made me feel guilty if I gave them cash or if I refused, because I was determined to engage with people on a human level, to know their names and see their faces; but no matter what I did, I was left with the feeling that the problem was outside my control, that I was powerless, that I was contributing somehow. After a while, though, people stopped asking me for money because I’d learned to do what Portlanders do— don’t carry cash, put headphones in, don’t make eye contact, keep walking. I can’t remember the last time someone stopped me on the street, but that’s because I know how to studiously ignore them now.
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In doing this work, I am learning to take a deeper look at people again, and to not accept the narrative that has been produced for me by policy and perpetuated in the media and our conversations. Though I can't solve homelessness, I do believe that by changing the way we talk about these situations will change the way we think about them and, in the end, the way we act.
The project
Activist applied linguistics
The work that I have done for this class has centered around what Janet calls Activist Applied Linguistics. While this should by no means be taken as a comprehensive definition of this term, below are a few ideas about what that might look like:
Applied Linguistics, unlike "Linguistics Applied" or other applied sciences, is not simply a matter of taking research done in General/Theoretical Linguistics and laying it over a problem. Rather, it starts at the ground and works in both directions: Applied Linguistics seeks to work together with the people experiencing a particular issue; in this way, we hope that linguistics both influences and is influenced by the work being done. When we layer activism on top of this, it is to seek out social injustices and and to question structures and systems of power.
Some examples of projects that Janet has done in this vein are:
-Working with the Oregon State Bar to revise their public information pages so that the information is accessible to those who might have a low-literacy rate or be non-native speakers of English.
-Creating Q-statements (a Q-sort is a type of survey that forces participants to rank statements on a bell curve rather than on a Likert scale) to find out Oregon residents' beliefs about the future of Oregon water resources
-the $PEAK OUT collaborative art project, where participants write messages on dollar bills to express the diversity of human history, language, and experience.
Applied Linguistics, unlike "Linguistics Applied" or other applied sciences, is not simply a matter of taking research done in General/Theoretical Linguistics and laying it over a problem. Rather, it starts at the ground and works in both directions: Applied Linguistics seeks to work together with the people experiencing a particular issue; in this way, we hope that linguistics both influences and is influenced by the work being done. When we layer activism on top of this, it is to seek out social injustices and and to question structures and systems of power.
Some examples of projects that Janet has done in this vein are:
-Working with the Oregon State Bar to revise their public information pages so that the information is accessible to those who might have a low-literacy rate or be non-native speakers of English.
-Creating Q-statements (a Q-sort is a type of survey that forces participants to rank statements on a bell curve rather than on a Likert scale) to find out Oregon residents' beliefs about the future of Oregon water resources
-the $PEAK OUT collaborative art project, where participants write messages on dollar bills to express the diversity of human history, language, and experience.
TImeline and role
There are several people at work on these projects this summer in the Applied Linguistics Department. Some are working on media about water in Oregon with the Oregon Water Stories project. Some, like me, are working on the "Change the Narrative" project. Some are doing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA); some are doing Corpus Analysis. In Linguistics, a researcher's best friend is the aid of other linguists, so we met as a group every week to discuss how the projects were going, what we were finding in our analyses, any problems we'd encountered, and where we were planning to look next.
For the "Narrative" project, I have been doing CDA in order to find what kinds of texts might be useful for doing Corpus Analysis on. As the vanguard, my role has been to get the project moving and see what directions are out there, what might be fruitful in the long run, what kinds of questions to ask for further research. Because the nature of this work is largely independent, my schedule was very free-form, but it often looked something like this:
-Tuesday afternoon weekly meeting in the Applied Linguistics office
-Wednesday start analysis based on meeting discussion
-Thursday-Sunday continue analysis as needed
-Monday prep for the next week, looking for new avenues and noting trends in the texts
Over the course of this project, my analysis has been of three main groups of texts: newspaper articles (one round from the Oregonian, one round from various newspapers about cities that had 'solved' homelessness), non-profit organizations Mission Statement pages, and some testimony provided at the Oregon legislature for measure HB2916.
For the "Narrative" project, I have been doing CDA in order to find what kinds of texts might be useful for doing Corpus Analysis on. As the vanguard, my role has been to get the project moving and see what directions are out there, what might be fruitful in the long run, what kinds of questions to ask for further research. Because the nature of this work is largely independent, my schedule was very free-form, but it often looked something like this:
-Tuesday afternoon weekly meeting in the Applied Linguistics office
-Wednesday start analysis based on meeting discussion
-Thursday-Sunday continue analysis as needed
-Monday prep for the next week, looking for new avenues and noting trends in the texts
Over the course of this project, my analysis has been of three main groups of texts: newspaper articles (one round from the Oregonian, one round from various newspapers about cities that had 'solved' homelessness), non-profit organizations Mission Statement pages, and some testimony provided at the Oregon legislature for measure HB2916.
Critical Discourse Analysis
Discourse Analysis is the sub-field of linguistics that is interested in language at the level of the text (for comparison, Phonology is interested in language at the level of the sound, and Syntax at the level of the sentence). This means that DA is relatively free-form, based on your understanding of what makes a text and how you decide to analyze it. There are many ways to go about DA: a couple of formal theories include Nexus Analysis and Register Analysis-- each of these has different objectives and different aspects of language that they examine. A linguist has to decide which kind of analysis will be helpful for both the kind of text they are analyzing and the question they are asking.
Critical Discourse Analysis is DA through the lens of Critical Theory. Critical Theory is complex and this definition should not be taken as comprehensive by any means, but for our purposes, Critical Theory assumes that everyone has a bias and that pretending otherwise is problematic. This means that in Critical research, the researchers state their bias upfront and give perspective and context to their research before they explain what they have done. They then ask questions of their work, such as, What systems of power are in place and who do they benefit? Who is not benefiting from these systems?
Though both Discourse Analysis and Critical Theory have more depth than I have given them here, these brief explanations will hopefully help you understand the work that I did this summer.
Critical Discourse Analysis is DA through the lens of Critical Theory. Critical Theory is complex and this definition should not be taken as comprehensive by any means, but for our purposes, Critical Theory assumes that everyone has a bias and that pretending otherwise is problematic. This means that in Critical research, the researchers state their bias upfront and give perspective and context to their research before they explain what they have done. They then ask questions of their work, such as, What systems of power are in place and who do they benefit? Who is not benefiting from these systems?
Though both Discourse Analysis and Critical Theory have more depth than I have given them here, these brief explanations will hopefully help you understand the work that I did this summer.
Homelessness discourse in portland |
The focus of my analyses has been verbs. As I mentioned above, the goal of this project is to look at the narrative around homelessness.
Below, you can see a screenshot of an analysis in process of testimony presented at the Oregon legislature. |
On the left is the full text I am analyzing with the verbs bolded. It is helpful to read through whatever I am analyzing first to get a sense of what it is trying to say and the position of the author.
After a preliminary reading, I look for the agent and theme of each sentence, or the thing that acts and the thing that is acted upon (there are more complicated semantic definitions of agent and theme, as well as more terms, such as experiencer and instrument, but for sake of simplicity, here we are only talking about agent and theme). I then categorize the tense (and aspect) of each verb. Following that is transitivity: a transitivity analysis in DA is not transitivity in grammatical terms (that means it doesn't have to do with whether or not the verb takes an object); rather, transitivity categorizes verbs based on what kind of verb it is, so, whether it is an action, a thought process, saying something, etc. The negative/positive category is looking at positivity in grammatical terms; that is, whether or not the verb is negated, not whether it has a positive sense or not. The active/passive category is also grammatical, whether or not the subject of the sentence is also the agent. Lastly, any presuppositions found within the text are listed in the last column: a presupposition happens in a complex sentence (meaning it has more than one clause), and treats something as a fact to base new information on.
The goal of all of these categories is to understand how the narratives about homelessness are being presented. It is helpful to know who is being acted upon, who is given active sentences (read: who has power), what is being treated as a known fact that is actually an assumption. These give us the chance to explore the homelessness narrative in Portland, and then, hopefully, to change it.
After a preliminary reading, I look for the agent and theme of each sentence, or the thing that acts and the thing that is acted upon (there are more complicated semantic definitions of agent and theme, as well as more terms, such as experiencer and instrument, but for sake of simplicity, here we are only talking about agent and theme). I then categorize the tense (and aspect) of each verb. Following that is transitivity: a transitivity analysis in DA is not transitivity in grammatical terms (that means it doesn't have to do with whether or not the verb takes an object); rather, transitivity categorizes verbs based on what kind of verb it is, so, whether it is an action, a thought process, saying something, etc. The negative/positive category is looking at positivity in grammatical terms; that is, whether or not the verb is negated, not whether it has a positive sense or not. The active/passive category is also grammatical, whether or not the subject of the sentence is also the agent. Lastly, any presuppositions found within the text are listed in the last column: a presupposition happens in a complex sentence (meaning it has more than one clause), and treats something as a fact to base new information on.
The goal of all of these categories is to understand how the narratives about homelessness are being presented. It is helpful to know who is being acted upon, who is given active sentences (read: who has power), what is being treated as a known fact that is actually an assumption. These give us the chance to explore the homelessness narrative in Portland, and then, hopefully, to change it.
Where we're at now
trends: homelessness, houselessness, lacking permanent shelter
One thing I was interested to explore in this research was the use of terms to designate the population we were discussing: that is to say, people traditionally referred to as homeless. During our meetings, one thing that Janet brought up was the use of homeless as an adjective to describe anyone who looked disarrayed or dirty in some way, whether they were living on the streets or not. Houseless, on the other hand, is a term that has been cropping up more and more to replace homeless, particularly in the context, "individuals experiencing houselessness." Because these were the two main terms we had heard, we were interested in noting who used which one, and where.
As mentioned above, in my analysis I moved from newspaper articles, to non-profit Mission Statements, to legislative testimony, and I was surprised by what I found in the use of these terms. In general, newspaper articles used "homeless person" and "homeless individual" as their designations, which was essentially what was expected. However, in the Mission Statements, we expected much more progressive language, and what we found was that most Mission Statements used the same terms as the newspaper articles, with perhaps a slight up-tick in the use of "individuals experiencing homelessness." Our theory about this was that with homeless being the common term, to save any confusion on the part of interested people reading the organizational websites, homeless was preferred over houseless.
The testimony from the Oregon legislature had some interesting divisions. Where most of the testimony was in favor of passing HB2916, people generally used the world houseless or people experiencing homeless/houselessness. There were only two texts in opposition to this measure, and these two used the word homeless more freely. However, the text of the measure itself prefers the term "individuals or families who lack permanent shelter," but also switches to homeless on occasion.
What these terms seem to indicate is that the narrative is already in the middle of a shift. Where homeless and it's connotations are becoming unfavorable, people are looking for different ways to describe someone who has to sleep on the street-- which is a complicated task, but at least suggests that people are challenging the way that they have been thinking, and realizing that the dialogue needs to shift.
As mentioned above, in my analysis I moved from newspaper articles, to non-profit Mission Statements, to legislative testimony, and I was surprised by what I found in the use of these terms. In general, newspaper articles used "homeless person" and "homeless individual" as their designations, which was essentially what was expected. However, in the Mission Statements, we expected much more progressive language, and what we found was that most Mission Statements used the same terms as the newspaper articles, with perhaps a slight up-tick in the use of "individuals experiencing homelessness." Our theory about this was that with homeless being the common term, to save any confusion on the part of interested people reading the organizational websites, homeless was preferred over houseless.
The testimony from the Oregon legislature had some interesting divisions. Where most of the testimony was in favor of passing HB2916, people generally used the world houseless or people experiencing homeless/houselessness. There were only two texts in opposition to this measure, and these two used the word homeless more freely. However, the text of the measure itself prefers the term "individuals or families who lack permanent shelter," but also switches to homeless on occasion.
What these terms seem to indicate is that the narrative is already in the middle of a shift. Where homeless and it's connotations are becoming unfavorable, people are looking for different ways to describe someone who has to sleep on the street-- which is a complicated task, but at least suggests that people are challenging the way that they have been thinking, and realizing that the dialogue needs to shift.
the future
There is a lot left to do with this project and this work. Though my role is soon over, Janet and her team are going to continue working with PSU's HRAC (Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative-- there's that word again) to change this narrative in Portland. We have been collecting a large body of texts to work with and Corpus Analysis is just about ready to get under way. (Corpus, for anyone interested, is a way of creating a database in which you can search linguistic features, like the number of occurrences of a certain word, looking at what words commonly co-occur, describing which people commonly get quoted, etc.) I am excited about the future of this project, and I hope that we will all hear the effects of it in our own lives and cities.
Reflection
I jumped on board this project because I wanted to do service that put into practice some of the things I have spent my academic career learning about. Particularly with this being my last class as an undergraduate, I felt like it was time to be done with theory and start doing real work. The work itself was interesting and engaging to me, but I also learned more about what it means to be an applied linguist, how to trust my analyses, how to describe them to other people, and how to just get work done. It has been a positive learning experience in terms of linguistics, but also in terms of work experience. I am grateful to have had this opportunity to transition out of the learning stage of my career and into work. I was even given an office in the department to use while doing this project!
This summer has also been just a lot of fun. In my experience, there is nothing an applied linguist loves more than sitting around talking about social justice and language, and we spent a lot of time doing that over the course of this project. I got to get to know some people that I had seen in classes but never really met, I got to know my professor better, and I got to think about how to make language more equitable, all while having a good time. While enjoyment may not be critical to working, I do think that joy manifests itself in the results and it will be evident when this project is finished that the people who worked on it were passionate about what they were doing.
What I have been most struck by in participating in this project is the way in which community feeds and builds itself. Though most of the work I did was alone, with my computer, reading and categorizing verbs, what inspired me to keep going and spurred creative thinking was the meetings that I had with other group members. Even when we didn't stay on topic, it was good to hear about other peoples' experiences and emotions with the project: tired, pleased, overwhelmed, excited, saddened. I am reminded again and again that in talking about language, we are talking about humanity, and humanity functions best in community. Not only have the texts I've read reinforced this position in terms of the houseless population, but the work has made me realize that doing this project alone would have been impossible for me. I needed input and guidance, I needed ideas, I needed conversation, I needed people.
It is easy for me to feel sometimes that the work I am doing is all but useless: on the hierarchy of needs, it would seem that water, food, shelter, health care, are all much more important. But I am reminded that without language, we cannot tell anyone we need these things. Without language we are not connected to anyone. I know that there are individuals working to provide for the houseless population, and I have to trust that the work we are doing will contribute to that as well. Because we need more than stopgaps now-- we need to be done waiting for more shelter space, more affordable housing, better health care-- whatever the narrative is. We need to realize that action starts with us, and our words, and our community. The same way that I needed people to get through this project, we need each other to change our perspectives and come up with new solutions. If we are going to "Change the Narrative" in any way, it is going to take the cooperation of the community.
So with that, I would like to say thank you for reading and I hope that you take away from this at least a thought in the back of your mind; I hope that the next time you encounter a narrative, that you question it-- maybe it is fine the way that it is, but chances are, it is not serving everyone equitably. I hope that you can find even a small way to change it.
This summer has also been just a lot of fun. In my experience, there is nothing an applied linguist loves more than sitting around talking about social justice and language, and we spent a lot of time doing that over the course of this project. I got to get to know some people that I had seen in classes but never really met, I got to know my professor better, and I got to think about how to make language more equitable, all while having a good time. While enjoyment may not be critical to working, I do think that joy manifests itself in the results and it will be evident when this project is finished that the people who worked on it were passionate about what they were doing.
What I have been most struck by in participating in this project is the way in which community feeds and builds itself. Though most of the work I did was alone, with my computer, reading and categorizing verbs, what inspired me to keep going and spurred creative thinking was the meetings that I had with other group members. Even when we didn't stay on topic, it was good to hear about other peoples' experiences and emotions with the project: tired, pleased, overwhelmed, excited, saddened. I am reminded again and again that in talking about language, we are talking about humanity, and humanity functions best in community. Not only have the texts I've read reinforced this position in terms of the houseless population, but the work has made me realize that doing this project alone would have been impossible for me. I needed input and guidance, I needed ideas, I needed conversation, I needed people.
It is easy for me to feel sometimes that the work I am doing is all but useless: on the hierarchy of needs, it would seem that water, food, shelter, health care, are all much more important. But I am reminded that without language, we cannot tell anyone we need these things. Without language we are not connected to anyone. I know that there are individuals working to provide for the houseless population, and I have to trust that the work we are doing will contribute to that as well. Because we need more than stopgaps now-- we need to be done waiting for more shelter space, more affordable housing, better health care-- whatever the narrative is. We need to realize that action starts with us, and our words, and our community. The same way that I needed people to get through this project, we need each other to change our perspectives and come up with new solutions. If we are going to "Change the Narrative" in any way, it is going to take the cooperation of the community.
So with that, I would like to say thank you for reading and I hope that you take away from this at least a thought in the back of your mind; I hope that the next time you encounter a narrative, that you question it-- maybe it is fine the way that it is, but chances are, it is not serving everyone equitably. I hope that you can find even a small way to change it.