Homelessness has become widespread in the United States over the past 20 years. Despite vast amounts of money and resources focused on resolving this problem, homelessness continues to grow. Based on three years of ethnographic research on the sheltering industry, I argue that a hypothesis of deviancy provides a hegemonic conceptual framework within which responses to homelessness operate. As a result, routine practices treat disorders within homeless people while marginalizing strategies of collective resistance against systemic inequities as unreasonable. Chapter 2 examines the political-economic context within which homelessness prospers. I explore responses to homelessness on the level of social policy and concrete actions undertaken locally by homeless people and advocates. Despite data suggesting a correlation between systemic inequality and homelessness, responses focus on developing more services to treat disorders within homeless people. Chapter 3 analyzes "helping" practices within the homeless shelter. Discourses of self-help and the medicalization of social problems guide efforts to detect and treat disorders. I argue that an effect of these actions is the production of self-blaming and self-governing homeless subjects unlikely to engage in collective resistance. The subject effects of statistical record-keeping practices re-producing "the homeless" as a category of subjects to be governed are also analyzed. Chapter 4, focusing on the experiences of one homeless woman, further analyzes how homeless people, even those who are non-compliant, remain enmeshed in a discourse of deviancy. Through examining staff hiring, training, and responses to increasing homelessness, Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate how the proper role for shelter staff is defined as a helping professional managing and governing homeless people within a therapeutic relationship. Finally, in Chapter 7, I discuss the potential of an explicitly oppositional ethnographic engagement. Through an activist ethnographic intervention which explicitly takes sides against "common sense" conceptions, I explore how dominant discursive practices may lose their dominance as "normal" through engaging with social actors in problematizing routine practices and perceptions. New understandings become conceptually possible, creating space for new resistance practices to emerge within the shelter and in the local community.

This dissertation examines the cultural and political forces that shape and direct AIDS policy in the United States. Through a multi-sited, ethnographic research project in Springfield, Massachusetts, a post-industrial city with the 11th highest per capita AIDS rate in the nation, this project investigates the political culture that informs and directs needle exchange legislation. With a move toward a more politically engaged ethnography, this research blends political activism, participant observation, open-ended interviews and political analysis to provide an “insider” study of the policymaking process as it unfolded on the ground –from the Massachusetts State House and Springfield City Hall to an illegal needle exchange program operated by local AIDS activists. The political antagonism at the center of my investigation is a conflict between, on the one hand, the scientific consensus on the efficacy of needle exchange, and on the other, the moralizing discourse associated with injection drug use. Here, the often-contradictory forces of science and morality form a paradox within the policymaking process: although there is scientific consensus on the efficacy of needle exchange, needle exchange legislation is continuously defeated on moral grounds. Locating this paradox in the propensity of the American state - beginning with the Reagan administration in the early 1980s - to calibrate social policy through a juridical combination of an enhanced liberal individualism with neoliberal economic reforms, this dissertation interrogates the means by which policymakers harness a particular worldview of human nature–individual will, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, economic man–to make sense of the AIDS epidemic. To what extent can we locate the present role of moralism in American social policy as indicative of our contemporary political culture? Do social policies operate as forms of moral regulation to govern people in alignment with “the common sense of our age?” If so, can we then argue that social policies are an essential feature of liberal statecraft, a system of moral governance that is reconfiguring the contemporary relationship between individual and society? The immediate concern for democratic politics is the prospect that social policies directed at the needs of politically marginalized groups may not motivated by social concerns alone but based on the cultural stigma associated with their practices.

The Transition movement is a grassroots movement working to build community resilience in response to the challenges of climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and economic insecurity. Rather than focusing on the state as a site for contestation or change, the movement adopts a "do it ourselves" approach, prioritizing autonomy and prefigurative action. It also places importance on relationships and community in the context of local places. It is open-ended and characterized by an ethos of experimentation and learning. Transition shares these place-based and prefigurative features in common with many other contemporary movements, from the Zapatistas to alternative globalization movements, to popular movements in Latin America, to most recently the Occupy movement. Though often not seen as "political" by conventional definitions that understand social movements in relation to the state, I argue that Transition's choice of practical, place-based forms and commitments is an ethical-political one, based on the state's failure to meet crises of our times, and it has political effects. In exploring the movement in its own terms, this ethnographic study of the Transition movement in the northeast US demonstrates the ways in which activists are locating power and possibility in the local and the everyday. Operating in the terrain of culture and knowledge production, the Transition movement is engaged in an effort to shift subjectivities and social relations, and to resignify power, security, economy, and democracy. Paying attention to the Transition movement's specifically place-based, prefigurative features provides a better understanding of the potential of this approach and its political significance. It also sheds light on tensions, which in the US context include challenges in addressing racism, inequality, and the neoliberal state.

The political entity of the County of Franklin, Massachusetts was created in 1811 and exists at the pleasure of the state legislature. In 1986, Franklin County politicians were given the opportunity to write a charter for the county, an event which was unique in 300 years of Massachusetts political history. I investigated the political processes by which Franklin County politicians articulated and put into operation their ideals of democracy, representation, and other dominant political concepts. My emphasis was to explore these processes anthropologically in order to discover the cultural and social processes at work in political arenas. I also document a historical moment. I conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Franklin County (1986-1988) utilizing participant-observation techniques, formal and informal interviewing and archival research. My focus of attention was on the development of political conflicts between two factions who struggled to gain control of Franklin County's future. In addition, I focused on how such political operators excluded and silenced public voices and professional staff which sought to interject themselves into the conflicts. This dissertation contains representative segments of political discourses as they were framed within specific struggles. I identify such dialogues as the chief symbolic capital which was mobilized, domesticated, and used to produce various documents containing plans for the future of the county. In addition, I present my observations and information gleaned from interviews in order to describe the larger social contexts which contained this particular struggle. In my discussion, I locate my investigation of the charter process within theoretical treatments of power relations. I also discuss the implications of the charter commission in terms of public policy. And finally, I point to epistemological and methodological implications and challenges of conducting traditional anthropological fieldwork among powerful peoples.