‘Out of Sight Out of Mind’: A City’s Position on Local Encampments a Critical Discourse Analysis of Secondary Discourse, about Homelessness and Responsibility in the Hamilton Community

Abstract

Amidst the changing social and economic landscape of the city due to the Covid-19 global pandemic, Hamilton has seen a spike in the visible homeless population and the increasing presence of tent cities occupying public space, sparking controversy within the local community. Media portrayals of the tent occupancies have focused on homelessness through the use of deviance frames, focusing on crime, violence and danger, as well as negative personality traits that include weak moral laxity, overall laziness, and willful dependence on the state. This is to delegitimize the plight of this group, in favour of the City’s approach to criminalize, displace, disband and exclude. The media discourse negates the growing body of evidence that homelessness is a by-product of economic, political and global shifts towards neo-liberal restructuring. The study seeks to understand how and why the individual-blaming narrative maintains its dominance, to become accepted as truth and reproduced by the general public in the public sphere; particularly as it relates to public understandings of the causes of homelessness and who is responsible. This study finds that the dominant discourse is led by neoliberal ideology which underpins

and permeates all facets of society. The study’s findings are threefold. 1. The elites who support

a neo-liberal agenda have been effective in managing the opinions of the general public to accept

their framing of the problem and also the solutions. This means that the general public continues

to uphold a neo-liberal agenda even when it is against their best interests. 2. The discourse is maintained through deliberate and strategic positioning of one group against another. 3. Given continued public support neoliberalism will continue to dominate the future of economic, political and social policy, that impacts the welfare of the members of this community including the community’s most vulnerable homeless population. With that in mind, social work must navigate these tensions and conflicts within the oppressive systems, to both maintain them and work against them insofar as they are meeting the needs of the community. Social workers must manage dual tasks/roles of maintaining jobs, funding and supports, while finding ways to critique and resist these systems that maintain unequal power relations.