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Teresa Gowan, Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2010)
Since the late 1970s homelessness in North America has grown substantially. Over this period research has not only documented the extent to which homelessness has increased, but has offered a range of explanations that purport how to make sense of the phenomenon. According to Gowan, these explanations can be categorized into three categories - "sin talk," "sick talk" and "system talk" - which will be further explained below. In many respects her rich and extremely well written ethnography is organized around these particular constructions.
Grounded in an astonishing 1,700 hours of fieldwork carried out in San Francisco between the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, Gowan's book follows the lives of a group of homeless men, mainly African American. The book is comprised of three parts, contains seven chapters, and is informed by an ethnographic discourse analysis. Cowan adopts discourse analysis because it "opens a path around social science's interminable tussle between the concept of a self-reproducing culture of poverty and the nearly as old counter argument that deviant practices among the poor represent common sense adaptations to difficult circumstances." As a way of by-passing this apparent worn out debate, Gowan's text is intended to reveal...