Research in Progress

My ongoing research projects examine how nonprofit organizations conceive, justify, and administer interventions targeting homelessness and poverty, and how their interventions affect the well-being of homeless and poor populations in America.

I am currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Governing Homelessness: Why Nonprofits’ Ideas Matter. The book aims to re-center the ideas conveyed by, and to re-locate the agency and influence of, community-based nonprofits in America, which, in the literature, are largely regarded as conduits of ideas about poverty and methods of poverty governance from above. It relies on over 150 interviews with executive leaders from homelessness-oriented nonprofits in dozens of American cities, representing all 50 states and Washington, DC, and an original corpus of written and visual materials from the public websites, social media accounts, and listservs of more than 550 nonprofits.

I also leverage these data in several standalone, article-length manuscripts, which are currently under review. For instance, one paper, “Network-Talk and the Management of Homelessness in America,” specifies an under-recognized causal story nonprofits tell about homelessness (ascribing it to the deterioration or loss of relationships in people’s lives), traces its genealogy and diffusion, and describes the strategies of governance it prompts. Another paper, “Place-Specific to Place-Agnostic: Understanding Local Provision in a Nonprofit Subsector,” posits nonprofits’ nonintuitive understandings of localness as a promising explanation for why they struggle to improve neighborhood or citywide welfare.

A new project focuses on nonprofit-led, master-planned villages, which constitute an emergent paradigm of homelessness relief. These villages provide affordable housing to homeless individuals, often in tiny homes; are designed and constructed with the intention of fostering connection, community, and a sense of family among residents; and frequently recruit already-housed individuals to live alongside newly housed individuals. The project will blend interviews with village leaders and administrators, ethnographic site visits, and other sources of data to answer questions at the intersection of housing, organizations, ideas, and inequality.

Please get in touch if you would like to discuss any of this work or if you are interested in exploring research collaborations.

Publications

In prior work, I have written about organizational and street-level dynamics that impact people experiencing homelessness, living in poverty, and/or trying to overcome drug addiction: